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. (JINS, 2005, 11,
668–676.)