Examining implicit metacognition in 3.5-year-old children: an eye-tracking and pupillometric study

Toddlers' visual exploration during decisions predicts uncertainty monitoring 1 year later

The longitudinal relation between toddlers' behaviors in uncertain situations (e.g., information seeking, hesitation) and preschoolers' uncertainty monitoring was investigated (between 2014 and 2019 in Northern California; Time 1: N = 183, M = 28.99 months, 53% female, 67.8% White; Time 2: N = 159, M = 41.64 months, 52.2% female). Eye movements and response latencies were recorded as children identified a target from two partially occluded (Time 1) or degraded (Time 2) images. Confidence ratings for identifications were collected at Time 2. At Time 1, gaze transitions between response options, but not response latencies and mental state language, predicted Time 2 uncertainty monitoring. Overall, these findings provide the first direct evidence of connections between toddlers' uncertainty behaviors and preschoolers' uncertainty monitoring.

Don't look back on failure: spontaneous uncertainty monitoring in chimpanzees

During computer-controlled cognitive tasks, chimpanzees often look up at the food dispenser, which activates at the same time as feedback for the correct choice but not for feedback for the incorrect choice. Do these "looking back" behaviors also indicate signs of spontaneous monitoring of their confidence in their choices? To address this question, we delayed the feedback for 1 s after their choice responses and observed their look-back behaviors during the delay period. Two chimpanzees looked up at the food dispenser significantly less frequently when their choice was incorrect (but the feedback was not given) than when it was correct. These look-back behaviors have not been explicitly trained under experimental contexts. Therefore, these results indicate that chimpanzees spontaneously change the frequency of their look-back behaviors in response to the correctness or incorrectness of their own choices, even without external feedback, suggesting that their look-back behaviors may reflect the level of "confidence" or "uncertainty" of their responses immediately before.

Do I know what they know? Linking metacognition, theory of mind, and selective social learning

Young children are often dependent on learning from others and to this effect develop heuristics to help distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources. Where younger children rely heavily on social cues such as familiarity with a source to make this distinction, older children tend to rely more on an informant's competence. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that help children to select the best informant; however, some evidence points toward mechanisms such as metacognition (thinking about thinking) and theory of mind (thinking about other's thoughts) being involved. The goals of the current study were to (a) explore how the monitoring and control components of metacognition may predict selective social learning in preschoolers and (b) attempt to replicate a reported link between selective social learning and theory of mind. In Experiment 1, no relationship was observed across the measures. In Experiment 2, only selective social learning and belief reasoning were found to be related as well as when both experiments' samples were combined. No links between selective social learning and metacognition were observed in the two experiments. These results suggest that theory of mind is a stronger correlate of selective learning than metacognition in young children. The implications regarding the kind of tasks used to measure metacognition are discussed.

Relations between parental metacognitive talk and children's early metacognition and memory

After decades of research suggesting that metacognition-that is, processes whereby people monitor and regulate their cognitive performance-did not emerge and is not related to children's performance until late childhood, recent studies have provided evidence that even preverbal infants can access their internal states. The existence of this basic metacognition raises the question of the variables influencing its development at such a young age and whether such early skills could predict successful cognitive performance. The current study had two main goals: (a) exploring the relation between parental metacognitive style and children's early metacognition and (b) determining whether these early metacognitive skills can predict children's memory performance. To this end, 2.5- to 4.5-year-old children (N = 72) and their parents were recruited. To assess parental metacognitive style, parent-child dyads were invited to participate in a 15-min session during which they played memory games. The parents' speech during this session was later coded for metacognitive content. Children's memory was assessed using cued recall and recognition tests. During one of these recognition tests, participants had the opportunity to ask for a cue to help them decide whether their response was correct (i.e., metacognitive measure). Results revealed that parental metacognitive style predicted both children's metacognitive accuracy and memory performance. Interestingly, a mediation effect of children's metacognitive skills on the relation between parental style and memory performance was found. These findings suggest that environmental factors such as parental metacognitive style are related to children's early metacognition, which in turn is linked to children's memory development.

Changing priorities in the development of cognitive competence and school learning: A general theory

This paper summarizes a theory of cognitive development and elaborates on its educational implications. The theory postulates that development occurs in cycles along multiple fronts. Cognitive competence in each cycle comprises a different profile of executive, inferential, and awareness processes, reflecting changes in developmental priorities in each cycle. Changes reflect varying needs in representing, understanding, and interacting with the world. Interaction control dominates episodic representation in infancy; attention control and perceptual awareness dominate in realistic representations in preschool; inferential control and awareness dominate rule-based representation in primary school; truth and validity control and precise self-evaluation dominate in principle-based thought in adolescence. We demonstrate that the best predictors of school learning in each cycle are the cycle's cognitive priorities. Also learning in different domains, e.g., language and mathematics, depends on an interaction between the general cognitive processes dominating in each cycle and the state of the representational systems associated with each domain. When a representational system is deficient, specific learning difficulties may emerge, e.g., dyslexia and dyscalculia. We also discuss the educational implications for evaluation and learning at school.

Foundations of intuitive power analyses in children and adults

Decades of research indicate that some of the epistemic practices that support scientific enquiry emerge as part of intuitive reasoning in early childhood. Here, we ask whether adults and young children can use intuitive statistical reasoning and metacognitive strategies to estimate how much information they might need to solve different discrimination problems, suggesting that they have some of the foundations for 'intuitive power analyses'. Across five experiments, both adults (N = 290) and children (N = 48, 6-8 years) were able to precisely represent the relative difficulty of discriminating populations and recognized that larger samples were required for populations with greater overlap. Participants were sensitive to the cost of sampling, as well as the perceptual nature of the stimuli. These findings indicate that both young children and adults metacognitively represent their own ability to make discriminations even in the absence of data, and can use this to guide efficient and effective exploration.

Metacognitive and Non-Metacognitive Processes in Arithmetic Performance: Can There Be More than One Meta-Level?

The nature of the development of arithmetic performance has long been intensively studied, and available scientific evidence can be evaluated and synthesized in light of Nelson and Narens’ model of metacognition. According to the Nelson–Narens model, human cognition can be split into two or more interrelated levels. Obviously, in the case of more than two levels, cognitive processes from at least one level can be described as both meta- and object-level processes. The question arises whether it is possible that the very same cognitive processes are both controlled and controlling. The feasibility of owning the same cognitive processes—which are considered the same from an external point of view of assessment—as both meta- and object-level processes within the same individual opens the possibility of investigating the transition from meta-level to object-level. Modeling cognitive development by means of a series of such transitions calls forth an understanding of possible developmental phases in a given domain of learning. The developmental phases of arithmetic performance are described as a series of transitions from arithmetical facts to strategies of arithmetic word problem solving. For school learning and instruction, the role of metacognitive scaffolding as a powerful educational approach is emphasized.

Self-awareness in Dementia: a Taxonomy of Processes, Overview of Findings, and Integrative Framework

Purpose of Review

Self-awareness, the capacity of becoming the object of one’s own awareness, has been a frontier of knowledge, but only recently scientific approaches to the theme have advanced. Self-awareness has important clinical implications, and a finer understanding of this concept may improve the clinical management of people with dementia. The current article aims to explore self-awareness, from a neurobiological perspective, in dementia.

Recent Findings

A taxonomy of self-awareness processes is presented, discussing how these can be structured across different levels of cognitive complexity. Findings on self-awareness in dementia are reviewed, indicating the relative preservation of capacities such as body ownership and agency, despite impairments in higher-level cognitive processes, such as autobiographical memory and emotional regulation.

Summary

An integrative framework, based on predictive coding and compensatory abilities linked to the resilience of self-awareness in dementia, is discussed, highlighting possible avenues for future research into the topic.

An evolutionary view of self-awareness

The capacity to be self-aware is regarded as a fundamental difference between humans and other species. However, growing evidence challenges this notion, indicating that many animals show complex signs and behaviors that are consonant with self-awareness. In this review, we suggest that many animals are indeed self-aware, but that the complexity of this process differs among species. We discuss this topic by addressing several different questions regarding self-awareness: what is self-awareness, how has self-awareness been studied experimentally, which species may be self-aware, what are its potential adaptive advantages. We conclude by proposing alternative models for the emergence of self-awareness in relation to species evolutionary paths, indicating future research questions to advance this field further.

The development of metacognitive accuracy in working memory across childhood

Growth in working memory capacity, the number of items kept active in mind, is thought to be an important aspect of childhood cognitive development. Here, we focused on participants' awareness of the contents of their working memory, or meta-working memory, which seems important because people can put cognitive abilities to best use only if they are aware of their limitations. In two experiments on the development of meta-working memory in children between 6 and 13 years old and adults, participants were to remember arrays of colored squares and to indicate if a probe item was in the array. On many trials, before the probe recognition test, they reported a metajudgment, how many items they thought they remembered. We compared meta-working memory judgments to actual performance and looked for associations between these measures on individual and trial-by-trial levels. Despite much lower working memory capacity in younger children there was little change in meta-working memory judgments across age groups. Consequently, younger participants were much less realistic in their metajudgments concerning their working memory capability. Higher cognitive capacity was associated with more accurate meta-working memory judgments within an age group. Trial-by-trial tuning of metajudgments was evident only in young adults and then only for small array set sizes. In sum, meta-working memory ability is a sophisticated skill that develops with age and may be an integral aspect of the development of working memory across the school years. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Student's Perspective and Teachers' Metacognition: Applications of Eye-Tracking in Education and Scientific Research in Schools

This Perspective article discusses the possible contributions of eye-tracking (ET) to the field of Educational Neuroscience based on an application of this tool at schools. We sought to explore the teachers’ view of ET videos recorded while students solved mathematical problems. More than 90% of the teachers could predict with great accuracy whether the students had answered the questions correctly or not based solely on the information provided by the ET videos. Almost all participants tried to translate the students’ thoughts to understand the strategy used by the children. Our results highlight the relevance of qualitative analysis to identify the gaze strategies used by students. We propose that ET allows teachers to gain critical feedback about students’ behavior during problem-solving. Most previous studies tend to emphasize the benefits of ET applications to explore learners’ cognition. Our findings point that this system can also be useful to investigate teachers’ cognition by providing metacognitive experiences.

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.

Developmental origins of cognitive offloading

Many animals manipulate their environments in ways that appear to augment cognitive processing. Adult humans show remarkable flexibility in this domain, typically relying on internal cognitive processing when adequate but turning to external support in situations of high internal demand. We use calendars, calculators, navigational aids and other external means to compensate for our natural cognitive shortcomings and achieve otherwise unattainable feats of intelligence. As yet, however, the developmental origins of this fundamental capacity for cognitive offloading remain largely unknown. In two studies, children aged 4-11 years (n = 258) were given an opportunity to manually rotate a turntable to eliminate the internal demands of mental rotation--to solve the problem in the world rather than in their heads. In study 1, even the youngest children showed a linear relationship between mental rotation demand and likelihood of using the external strategy, paralleling the classic relationship between angle of mental rotation and reaction time. In study 2, children were introduced to a version of the task where manually rotating inverted stimuli was sometimes beneficial to performance and other times redundant. With increasing age, children were significantly more likely to manually rotate the turntable only when it would benefit them. These results show how humans gradually calibrate their cognitive offloading strategies throughout childhood and thereby uncover the developmental origins of this central facet of intelligence.

Knowing who knows: Metacognitive and causal learning abilities guide infants' selective social learning

Given the widespread interest in the development of children's selective social learning, there is mounting evidence suggesting that infants prefer to learn from competent informants (Poulin-Dubois & Brosseau-Liard, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2016, 25). However, little research has been dedicated to understanding how this selectivity develops. The present study investigated whether causal learning and precursor metacognitive abilities govern discriminant learning in a classic word-learning paradigm. Infants were exposed to a speaker who accurately (reliable condition) or inaccurately (unreliable condition) labeled familiar objects and were subsequently tested on their ability to learn a novel word from the informant. The predictive power of causal learning skills and precursor metacognition (as measured through decision confidence) on infants' word learning was examined across both reliable and unreliable conditions. Results suggest that infants are more inclined to accept an unreliable speaker's testimony on a word learning task when they also lack confidence in their own knowledge on a task measuring their metacognitive ability. Additionally, when uncertain, infants draw on causal learning abilities to better learn the association between a label and a novel toy. This study is the first to shed light on the role of causal learning and precursor metacognitive judgments in infants' abilities to engage in selective trust.

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.

Gestural and Prosodic Development Act as Sister Systems and Jointly Pave the Way for Children's Sociopragmatic Development

Children might combine gesture and prosody to express a pragmatic meaning such as a request, information focus, uncertainty or politeness, before they can convey these meanings in speech. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of gestural and prosodic patterns and how they relate to a child's growing understanding and propositional use of these sociopragmatic meanings. Do gesture and prosody act as sister systems in pragmatic development? Do children acquire these components of language before they are able to express themselves through spoken language, thus acting as forerunners in children's pragmatic development? This review article assesses empirical evidence that demonstrates that gesture and prosody act as intimately related systems and, importantly, pave the way for pragmatic acquisition at different developmental stages. The review goes on to explore how the integration of gesture and prosody with semantics and syntax can impact language acquisition and how multimodal interventions can be used effectively in educational settings. Our review findings support the importance of simultaneously assessing both the prosodic and the gestural components of language in the fields of language development, language learning, and language intervention.

Behaviors speak louder than explicit reports: Implicit metacognition in 2.5-year-old children

Recent research has shown that children as young as age 3.5 show behavioral responses to uncertainty although they are not able to report it explicitly. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that some form of metacognition is already available to guide children's decisions before the age of 3. Two groups of 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children were asked to complete a forced-choice perceptual identification test and to explicitly rate their confidence in each decision. Moreover, participants had the opportunity to ask for a cue to help them decide if their response was correct. Our results revealed that all children asked for a cue more often after an incorrect response than after a correct response in the forced-choice identification test, indicating a good ability to implicitly introspect on the results of their cognitive operations. On the contrary, none of these children displayed metacognitive sensitivity when making explicit confidence judgments, consistent with previous evidence of later development of explicit metacognition. Critically, our findings suggest that implicit metacognition exists much earlier than typically assumed, as early as 2.5 years of age.

The developmental trinity of mind: Cognizance, executive control, and reasoning

This paper summarizes research on how cognizance, that is, awareness of mental processes, interacts with executive control and reasoning from childhood to adolescence. Central positions are that (a) cognizance changes extensively with age; (b) it contributes to the formation of executive control, and (c) mediates between executive control and reasoning. Cognizance recycles with changes in executive and inferential possibilities in four developmental cycles: it registers their present state, yielding insight into their operation, allowing their better management; this catalyzes their transformation into the next level. Implications for theory of intellectual development and practical implications for education are discussed. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Neuroscience > Cognition Neuroscience > Development Philosophy > Consciousness.

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.

Developmental Differentiation and Binding of Mental Processes with g through the Life-Span

Integration/differentiation of mental processes is major mechanism of development. Developmental theories ascribe intellectual development to it. In psychometric theory, Spearman’s law of diminishing returns postulates that increasing g allows increasing differentiation of cognitive abilities, because increased mental power allows variable investment in domain-specific learning. Empirical evidence has been inconsistent so far, with some studies supporting and others contradicting this mechanism. This state of affairs is due to a developmental phenomenon: Both differentiation and strengthening of relations between specific processes and g may happen but these changes are phase-specific and ability-specific, depending upon the developmental priorities in the formation of g in each phase. We present eight studies covering the age span from 4 to 85 years in support of this phenomenon. Using new powerful modeling methods we showed that differentiation and binding of mental processes in g occurs in cycles. Specific processes intertwine with g at the beginning of cycles when they are integrated into it; when well established, these processes may vary with increasing g, reflecting its higher flexibility. Representational knowledge, inductive inference and awareness of it, and grasp of logical constraints framing inference are the major markers of g, first intertwining with in their respective cycles and differentiating later during the periods of 2–6, 7–11, and 11–20 years, respectively. The implications of these findings for an overarching cognitive developmental/differential theory of human mind are discussed.

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.

More to it than meets the eye: how eye movements can elucidate the development of episodic memory

The ability to recognise past events along with the contexts in which they occurred is a hallmark of episodic memory, a critical capacity. Eye movements have been shown to track veridical memory for the associations between events and their contexts (relational binding). Such eye-movement effects emerge several seconds before, or in the absence of, explicit response, and are linked to the integrity and function of the hippocampus. Drawing from research from infancy through late childhood, and by comparing to investigations from typical adults, patient populations, and animal models, it seems increasingly clear that eye movements reflect item-item, item-temporal, and item-spatial associations in developmental populations. We analyse this line of work, identify missing pieces in the literature and outline future avenues of research, in order to help elucidate the development of episodic memory.

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

Some studies, so far limited in number, suggest the existence of procedural metacognition in young children, that is, the practical capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive activity in a given task. The link between procedural metacognition and false belief understanding is currently under theoretical discussion. If data with primates seem to indicate that procedural metacognition and false belief understanding are not related, no study in developmental psychology has investigated this relation in young children. The present paper aims, first, to supplement the findings concerning young children's abilities to monitor and control their uncertainty (procedural metacognition) and, second, to explore the relation between procedural metacognition and false belief understanding. To examine this, 82 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with an opt-out task and with 3 false belief tasks. Results show that children can rely on procedural metacognition to evaluate their perceptual access to information, and that success in false belief tasks does not seem related to success in the task we used to evaluate procedural metacognition. These results are coherent with a procedural view of metacognition, and are discussed in the light of recent data from primatology and developmental psychology.

How to learn places without spatial concepts: Does the what-and-where reaction time system in children regulate learning during stimulus repetition?

We investigated the role of repetition for place learning in children although the acquisition of organizing spatial concepts is often seen as more essential. In a reaction-time accuracy task, 7- and 9-year-old children were presented with a randomized sequence of objects-in-places. In a novelty condition (NC), memory sets in different colors were presented, while in a repetition condition (RC), the identical memory set was tested several times. Shape memory deteriorated more than place memory in the NC, but also stayed superior to place memory when both improved in the RC. False alarms occurred for objects and places in the same way in 7-year-olds in the NC, but were negligible for 9-year-olds. In contrast, false alarms in the RC occurred in both age groups mainly for place memory. The Common Region Test (CRT) predicted reaction times only in the novelty condition, indicating use of spatial concepts. Importantly, reaction times for shapes were faster than for places at the beginning of the experiment but slowed down thereafter, while reaction times for places were slow at the beginning of the experiment but accelerated considerably thereafter. False alarms and regulation of reaction times indicated that repetition facilitated true abstraction of information leading to place learning without spatial concepts.

Beyond the experience: Detection of metamemorial regularities

We examined the mechanisms involved in the development of the easily learned, easily remembered (ELER) heuristic in three groups of young children (4-5 years, 6-7 years, and 8-9 years). A trial-to-acquisition procedure was used to evaluate how much these children's judgment of learning depended on the ELER heuristic. Moreover, a new experimental paradigm, composed of six phases-a pretest, four training phases, and a posttest-was employed to implicitly influence the validity of the ELER association that underlies this metacognitive rule. Results revealed that the ELER heuristic develops early (4-5years), but its use is reduced after implicit training. Furthermore, executive monitoring was found to account for the smaller changes observed in older children (8-9 years) after training. From a developmental perspective, these findings present a coherent picture of children's learning of metacognitive heuristics, wherein early automatic and implicit learning is later followed by effortful control.