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Groups of normal old and young adults made episodic memory feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments and took 2 types of episodic memory tests (cued recall and recognition). Neuropsychological tests of executive and memory functions thought to respectively involve the frontal and medial temporal structures were also administered. Age differences were observed on the episodic memory measures and on all neuropsychological tests. Compared with young adults, older adults performed at chance level on FOK accuracy judgments. Partial correlations indicated that a composite measure of frontal functioning and FOK accuracy were closely related. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the composite frontal functioning score accounted for a large proportion of the age-related variance in FOK accuracy. This finding supports the idea that the age-related decline in episodic memory FOK accuracy is mainly the result of executive or frontal limitations associated with aging.

Is metacognition a general resource shared across domains? Previous research has documented consistent biases in judgments across tasks. In contrast, there is debate regarding the domain generality or the domain specificity of the ability to discriminate between correct and incorrect answers (metacognitive sensitivity) because most previous work has documented nonsignificant correlations across domains. However, such null findings may be due to low statistical power and differences in task structure or performance, thereby masking a latent domain generality in metacognition. We examined across-domain correlations in confidence level and sensitivity in a large sample ( N = 181). Participants performed 4 2-alternative forced-choice tasks (episodic memory, semantic memory, executive function, and visual perception) with trial-by-trial confidence judgments. We found significant correlations in average confidence level across tasks. By applying a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate cross-task covariance, we found five out 6 cross-task correlations in metacognitive efficiency (meta- d ′/ d ′) were significant, even for pairs of tasks in which first-order performance was not correlated. This suggests that at least some components of metacognitive efficiency in retrospective confidence are domain general.

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This study explored how memory for actions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children might benefit from self-performance and experimenter demonstration, and whether these groups possess metamemory knowledge of their performance levels in this task. Children with autism were less accurate on the action memory task when they carried out each action themselves during encoding, or when no actions were implemented during this phase, but this difference was abolished when the experimenter demonstrated each action during encoding. Despite clear difficulties in the self-performed condition relative to typical children, the group with ASD also showed a beneficial effect of performing the actions themselves during instruction. Finally, children with autism were as accurate as typical children in judging the accuracy of their own memory performance, indicating an absence of metamemory difficulties for this task.