Procedural Metacognition and False Belief Understanding in 3- to 5-Year-Old Children

Is self-awareness necessary to have a theory of mind?

Forty years ago, Gallup proposed that theory of mind presupposes self-awareness. Following Humphrey, his hypothesis was that individuals can infer the mental states of others thanks to the ability to monitor their own mental states in similar circumstances. Since then, advances in several disciplines, such as comparative and developmental psychology, have provided empirical evidence to test Gallup's hypothesis. Herein, we review and discuss this evidence.

Memory Monitoring and Control in Japanese and German Preschoolers

Prior studies explored the early development of memory monitoring and control. However, little work has examined cross-cultural similarities and differences in metacognitive development in early childhood. In the present research, we investigated a total of 100 Japanese and German preschool-aged children's memory monitoring and control in a visual perception task. After seeing picture items, some of which were repeated, children were presented with picture pairs, one of which had been presented earlier and the other was a novel item. They then were asked to identify the previously presented picture. Children were also asked to evaluate their confidence about their selection, and to sort the responses to be used for being awarded with a prize at the end of the test. Both groups similarly expressed more confidence in the accurately remembered items than in the inaccurately remembered items, and their sorting decision was based on their subjective confidence. Japanese children's sorting more closely corresponded to memory accuracy than German children's sorting, however. These findings were further confirmed by a hierarchical Bayesian estimation of metacognitive efficiency. The present findings therefore suggest that early memory monitoring and control have both culturally similar and diverse aspects. The findings are discussed in light of broader sociocultural influences on metacognition.

Development of strategic social information seeking: Implications for cumulative culture

Human learners are rarely the passive recipients of valuable social information. Rather, learners usually have to actively seek out information from a variety of potential others to determine who is in a position to provide useful information. Yet, the majority of developmental social learning paradigms do not address participants’ ability to seek out information for themselves. To investigate age-related changes in children’s ability to seek out appropriate social information, 3- to 8-year-olds (N = 218) were presented with a task requiring them to identify which of four possible demonstrators could provide critical information for unlocking a box. Appropriate information seeking improved significantly with age. The particularly high performance of 7- and 8-year-olds was consistent with the expectation that older children’s increased metacognitive understanding would allow them to identify appropriate information sources. Appropriate social information seeking may have been overlooked as a significant cognitive challenge involved in fully benefiting from others’ knowledge, potentially influencing understanding of the phylogenetic distribution of cumulative culture.

Are children's judgments of another's accuracy linked to their metacognitive confidence judgments?

The world can be a confusing place, which leads to a significant challenge: how do we figure out what is true? To accomplish this, children possess two relevant skills: reasoning about the likelihood of their own accuracy (metacognitive confidence) and reasoning about the likelihood of others' accuracy (mindreading). Guided by Signal Detection Theory and Simulation Theory, we examine whether these two self- and other-oriented skills are one in the same, relying on a single cognitive process. Specifically, Signal Detection Theory proposes that confidence in a decision is purely derived from the imprecision of that decision, predicting a tight correlation between decision accuracy and confidence. Simulation Theory further proposes that children attribute their own cognitive experience to others when reasoning socially. Together, these theories predict that children's self and other reasoning should be highly correlated and dependent on decision accuracy. In four studies (N = 374), children aged 4-7 completed a confidence reasoning task and selective social learning task each designed to eliminate confounding language and response biases, enabling us to isolate the unique correlation between self and other reasoning. However, in three of the four studies, we did not find that individual differences on the two tasks correlated, nor that decision accuracy explained performance. These findings suggest self and other reasoning are either independent in childhood, or the result of a single process that operates differently for self and others.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11409-021-09263-x.

Metacognition and mindreading in young children: A cross-cultural study

Prior studies document cross cultural variation in the developmental onset of mindreading. In particular, Japanese children are reported to pass a standard false belief task later than children from Western countries. By contrast, we know little about cross-cultural variation in young children's metacognitive abilities. Moreover, one prominent theoretical discussion in developmental psychology focuses on the relation between metacognition and mindreading. Here we investigated the relation between mindreading and metacognition (both implicit and explicit) by testing 4-year-old Japanese and German children. We found no difference in metacognition between the two cultural groups. By contrast, Japanese children showed lower performance than German children replicating cultural differences in mindreading. Finally, metacognition and mindreading were not related in either group. We discuss the findings in light of the existing theoretical accounts of the relation between metacognition and mindreading.

Preschool Metacognitive Skill Assessment in Order to Promote Educational Sensitive Response From Mixed-Methods Approach: Complementarity of Data Analysis

A child's metacognitive skills contribute significantly to their learning and success. However, very few studies are focused on these skills at early education and most of them are carried out from inappropriate methodological perspectives for the characteristics of the youngest students. To overcome such limitations, it is essential to carry out observational studies that analyze children's metacognitive behaviors in the natural and habitual context of children's learning, as well as appropriate tasks for their level of development. The aim of this study was to analyze the sequential and associative structure of the metacognitive skills used by 5-year-old children throughout the resolution of a playful task (a puzzle). It was interesting to know if there were different hidden structures in the use of metacognitive skills in the children who solved the puzzle and those who did not. From the methodological approach, this work was located in the perspective of mixed methods which is characterized by the integration of qualitative and quantitative elements. This integration was carried out from the “connect” option. The integration involved developing quantitizing, as one of its possibilities. Recent scientific literature has considered systematic observation, in which the QUAL-QUAN-QUAL macro stages take place, as a mixed method itself. Consequently, systematic observation was applied, because it was suitable for our aim. A Nomothetic/Punctual/Multidimensional observational design was used. The playful activity of 44 preschool children solving the puzzle individually was coded. It allowed us to obtain data matrices that respond to the QUAL stage. Regarding the QUAN stage, once the quality of data was controlled, the records were further analyzed by differentiating two groups of participants (those who had solved the puzzle and those who did not) using three quantitative techniques of observational analysis (T-pattern detection, lag sequential analysis, polar coordinate analysis). Finally data was returned to a QUAL stage to interpret the results. The use of these three techniques allowed a detailed and in-depth analysis of the children's activity. Results reveal differences in the metacognitive abilities of the children that solved and didn't solve the puzzle. These results have important implications for educational practice.

When do you know what you know? The emergence of memory monitoring

Recent research on comparative metacognition shows that animals, like humans, can differentiate between what they know and what they do not know. However, not much is known about the metacognitive behaviors of human children during their early years. To explore the emergence of memory-monitoring skills, two experiments were conducted using nonverbal tasks adapted from the work of Kornell, Son, and Terrace (2007) and Hampton (2001). Experiment 1 endeavored to determine when children began to show the ability to monitor their memories retrospectively. Experiment 2 aimed to reveal when young children knew what they knew by assessing their prospective monitoring. The results suggested that 4- to 5-year-olds had the ability to judge retrospectively their accuracy in a serial position task, whereas 3- to 4-year-olds did not. In contrast, 4.5- to 5-year-olds could discern items present in and absent from their memory before recognition, whereas 4- to 4.5-year-olds could not. In conclusion, 4-year-olds began to make accurate confidence judgments retrospectively, and children who are approximately 4.5years old began to demonstrate prospective memory-monitoring skills.

Young Children's Sensitivity to Their Own Ignorance in Informing Others

Prior research suggests that young children selectively inform others depending on others’ knowledge states. Yet, little is known whether children selectively inform others depending on their own knowledge states. To explore this issue, we manipulated 3- to 4-year-old children’s knowledge about the content of a box and assessed the impact on their decisions to inform another person. Moreover, we assessed the presence of uncertainty gestures while they inform another person in light of the suggestions that children's gestures reflect early developing, perhaps transient, epistemic sensitivity. Finally, we compared children’s performance in the informing context to their explicit verbal judgment of their knowledge states to further confirm the existence of a performance gap between the two tasks. In their decisions to inform, children tend to accurately assess their ignorance, whereas they tend to overestimate their own knowledge states when asked to explicitly report them. Moreover, children display different levels of uncertainty gestures depending on the varying degrees of their informational access. These findings suggest that children’s implicit awareness of their own ignorance may be facilitated in a social, communicative context.