Soutenance de thèse : Fabien Carreras

Feeling of Retrieval in Autobiographical Memory: Exploring Pre-retrieval Metacognitive Awareness in Younger and Older Adults 

Many studies have documented the processes by which specific past episodes are retrieved from autobiographical memory. This thesis focuses on a key cognitive process so far rarely measured in relation with autobiographical memory retrieval: metacognition. The metacognitive literature has suggested that early feelings of familiarity could act as signals and guide subsequent retrieval attempts in episodic and semantic memory. The aim of this thesis was to extend such results to the study of autobiographical memory. We conducted a series of experiments that investigated whether metacognitive feelings, such as familiarity, and their monitoring, guide autobiographical memory retrieval. To do so, we created new experimental designs that provided evidence regarding the involvement of metacognition in autobiographical memory the pre-retrieval stage. We first carried out two studies investigating whether individuals could distinguish cues that would allow fluent access to their autobiographical memory from cues that would limit it by using a new procedure inspired by Feeling of knowing paradigms: the Feeling of Retrieval (Chapter 4). Participants metacognitive judgements were performed in a short time frame aiming at preventing complete retrieval. These studies revealed that participants' metacognitive judgements were diagnostic of their subsequent autobiographical memory retrieval, meaning that they have a pre retrieval metacognitive access to their memory. We then explored the basis of the participants' metacognitive judgements in the Feeling of Retrieval by testing respectively the use of feeling of familiarity, quick access to partial autobiographical memory information, and how objective stimuli characteristics influence the efficiency of autobiographical memory retrieval (Chapter 5). We found that each of these metacognitive cues contributed to the metacognitive judgements but were not always diagnostic of subsequent AM retrieval fluency. We also investigated the influence of ageing on the metacognitive abilities assessed by the Feeling of Retrieval (Chapter 6). Finally, we explored whether older adults were able to monitor the ease with which they could retrieve autobiographical memory from different periods of their lives (Chapter 7). While our findings suggest that older adults' metacognitive abilities do not differ from that of young adults in the Feeling of Retrieval, they also show that older adults failed to monitor their retrieval when they were about broader life periods. This thesis bridges the autobiographical memory and metacognitive literatures. Multiple methodological innovations are described, which allow paradigmatic research in this domain. We showed that individuals have pre-retrieval metacognitive access to their autobiographical memory when metacognitive judgements are about specific stimuli in relation with the retrieval of specific memories. However, broader metacognitive judgements seem inaccurate. We explore how such evidence offers perspectives for various fields of cognitive psychology. Supervisors Céline Souchay, Andrea Tales, Claire Barnes