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Thinking About Memory: How Confident Are You in Your Memory, and Does it Change With Age?

NCT06539403 · Status: RECRUITING · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 72

Last updated 2024-08-06

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Memory and our own beliefs and confidence in our ability to remember are important for our daily lives. For example, low confidence may hold us back from doing certain tasks, whereas misplaced high confidence in our memories may lead us to false beliefs about what has happened in the past.

However, it is not fully understood how people form their beliefs about their memory abilities. These beliefs we hold about how good our memory is are form of evaluation of our own abilities known as 'metacognition'. The purpose of this study is to better understand how individuals, both with and without diagnosed memory difficulties, perform memory tasks and examine whether their metacognition of their memory performance depends on the type of memory task. That is, the study examines metacognition for different forms of memory; for example memory of our experienced life events as compared to memory for facts. There is still much more to learn about how individuals experience and think about their memories and memory abilities; and understanding this is important as some evidence suggests that good metacognition is associated with better outcomes after diagnosis of cognitive impairment. Understanding metacognitive beliefs about memory could be a route to earlier diagnosis and enable us to identify people who are likely to develop dementia.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Memory tasks

Naturalistic Episodic Memory encoding: Participants will play short sessions of 3 board games with the researcher. The board games include Ludo, Snakes \& Ladders and Solitaire. Participants will play each boardgame for around 5 min. They will wear a head camera while playing the games. Later participants will be tested on their memory of the naturalistic episodic memory task, a semantic memory task (memory of facts) and a perceptual task. Each task will consist of 2-3 sub-tasks of around 30 trials. These tasks will all take place on the computer and will take 30-40 minutes in total. In each trial participants will choose between two options. For example: Which of these two images is taken from your head camera? What colour piece did you use in 'snakes and ladders'?. After they choose their answer, they will report how confident they are in their choice. At the end of each task, they will be asked to report how well they think they performed on the task overall.

Sponsors & Collaborators

Eligibility

Min Age
65 Years
Max Age
120 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2024-02-08
Primary Completion
2025-04-30
Completion
2025-06-30

Countries

  • United Kingdom

Study Locations

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Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT06539403 on ClinicalTrials.gov