Metamemory refers to knowledge about one's memory capabilities and strategies that can aid memory, as well as the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. Although metamemory has been studied in cognitive psychology for several decades, there have been fewer studies investigating the neuropsychology of metamemory. In recent years, a growing number of studies of neurological patient groups have been conducted in order to investigate the neural correlates of metamemory. In this review, we examine the neuropsychological evidence that the frontal lobes are critically involved in monitoring and control processes, which are the central components of metamemory. The following conclusions are drawn from this literature: (1) There is a strong correlation between indices of frontal lobe function or structural integrity and metamemory accuracy (2) The combination of frontal lobe dysfunction and poor memory severely impairs metamemorial processes (3) Metamemory tasks vary in subject performance levels, and quite likely, in the underlying processes these different tasks measure, and (4) Metamemory, as measured by experimental tasks, may dissociate from basic memory retrieval processes and from global judgments of memory.

Previous research has provided evidence of metamemory impairments in patients with frontal lobe damage on verbal episodic memory tasks. In the present study, we employed metamemory paradigms to investigate whether patients with frontal lesions show monitoring deficits on semantic memory tasks involving facial stimuli. Patients with frontal lobe damage and healthy control subjects made memory decisions to famous faces in a retrospective confidence judgment task and in a prospective feeling-of-knowing (FOK) task. Results indicated that frontal patients performed worse than controls on the retrospective confidence task, but there were no differences between the groups on the FOK task. These findings suggest that metamemory deficits in frontal patients are not confined to specific stimulus domains (words vs. faces) or memory systems (episodic vs. semantic). In addition, the dissociation between retrospective confidence judgments and FOK accuracy documented in this study and also in a recent report by Schnyer et al. suggesting that metamemory should not be considered a unitary function with a single neuroanatomic substrate.