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.

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.

Four- to Six-Year-Old Children's Sensitivity to Reliability Versus Consensus in the Endorsement of Object Labels.

Recent studies have demonstrated that young children use past reliability and consensus to endorse object labels. Until now, no study has investigated how children weigh these two cues when they are in conflict. The two experiments reported here were designed to explore whether any initial preference for information provided by a consensual group would be influenced by the group's subsequent unreliability. The results show that 4- and 5-year-old children were more likely to endorse labels provided by an unreliable but consensual group than the labels provided by a reliable dissenter. Six-year-olds displayed the reverse pattern. The article concludes by discussing the methodological implications of the two experiments and the developmental trajectory regarding the way children weigh consensuality versus reliability.

Metacognitive monitoring of oneself and others: developmental changes during childhood and adolescence.

The current study examined the development of people's knowledge about others' learning and memory processes. To this end, participants of four different age groups (6- and 7-year-old children, 8- to 10-year-old children, 14- and 15-year-old adolescents, and adults) observed another person performing a paired associate learning task, allocating either little or more time to the paired associates. Participants were asked to estimate the likelihood of recall by giving judgments of learning (JoLs) for every item pair (Other Task). In addition, we manipulated whether participants performed an equivalent task themselves (Self Task) before or after the evaluation of the other. Our results show significant developmental effects, with the older two age groups, but not the younger two age groups, differentiating between the short and long video sequences when giving JoLs in the Other Task. Moreover, the results revealed an impact of having performed the Self Task beforehand on participants' JoLs in the Other Task, suggesting that metacognitive knowledge about the other is informed by experiential cues during the actual (i.e., firsthand), learning process.

Curiosity as a metacognitive feeling.

Curious information-seeking is known to be a key driver for learning, but characterizing this important psychological phenomenon remains a challenge. In this article, we argue that solving this challenge requires qualifying the relationships between metacognition and curiosity. The idea that curiosity is a metacognitive competence has been resisted: researchers have assumed both that young children and non-human animals can be genuinely curious, and that metacognition requires conceptual and culturally situated resources that are unavailable to young children and non-human animals. Here, we argue that this resistance is unwarranted given accumulating evidence that metacognition can be deployed procedurally, and we defend the view that curiosity is a metacognitive feeling. Our metacognitive view singles out two monitoring steps as a triggering condition for curiosity: evaluating one's own informational needs, and predicting the likelihood that explorations of the proximate environment afford significant information gains. We review empirical evidence and computational models of curiosity, and show that they fit well with this metacognitive account, while on the contrary, they remain difficult to explain by a competing account according to which curiosity is a basic attitude of questioning. Finally, we propose a new way to construe the relationships between curiosity and the human-specific communicative practice of questioning, discuss the issue of how children may learn to express their curiosity through interactions with others, and conclude by briefly exploring the implications of our proposal for educational practices.

Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: the case of Change Blindness Blindness.

Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as "Change Blindness" (CB). They are, in addition, "blind to their own blindness". A common explanation of this "Change Blindness Blindness" (CBB) is that it derives from an inadequate, "photographical" folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their self-evaluations on two activity-dependent cues, namely search time and perceived success in prior trials. These cues were found to influence self-evaluation in two orthogonal ways: success-feedback influenced self-evaluation in a global, contextual way, presumably by recalibrating the norm of adequacy for the task. Search time influenced it in a local way, predicting the success of a given trial from its duration.

Cognitive enhancement, human evolution and bioethics.

The goal of this article are three-fold. The first is to explore the relations between the properties designated by the terms "human", "post-human," "Transhuman", and to clarify the corresponding "isms". The second is to scrutinize the current techniques for cognitive enhancement in order to assess their relations with the three categories just mentioned, and, with the specific ethical issues that they are raising. The third is to examine whether general ethical principles could be invoked either in favor of or against, the normative proposals of post- and trans-humanism, and to consider how compatible the types of enhancement presently developed are with respect to these principles.

12- and 24-Month-Old Infants' Search Behavior Under Informational Uncertainty.

Infants register and react to informational uncertainty in the environment. They also form expectations about the probability of future events as well as update the expectation according to changes in the environment. A novel line of research has started to investigate infants' and toddlers' behavior under uncertainty. By combining these research areas, the present research investigated 12- and 24-month-old infants' searching behaviors under varying degree of informational uncertainty. An object was hidden in one of three possible locations and probabilistic information about the hiding location was manipulated across trials. Infants' time delay in search initiation for a hidden object linearly increased across the level of informational uncertainty. Infants' successful searching also varied according to probabilistic information. The findings suggest that infants modulate their behaviors based on probabilistic information. We discuss the possibility that infants' behavioral reaction to the environmental uncertainty constitutes the basis for the development of subjective uncertainty.

Selective learning and teaching among Japanese and German children.

Despite an increasing number of studies demonstrating that young children selectively learn from others, and a few studies of children's selective teaching, the evidence almost exclusively comes from Western cultures, and cross-cultural comparison in this line of work is very rare. In the present research, we investigated Japanese and German children's selective learning and teaching abilities. We found clear cultural differences. Japanese children were better at selectively teaching an ignorant person over a knowledgeable person than at selectively learning from knowledgeable others. By contrast, German children were better at choosing to learn from a knowledgeable rather than from an ignorant person than at selectively teaching ignorant others. The present findings suggest that the development of human learning and teaching, especially the tendency to take into account others' knowledge status, is strongly affected by cultural background. (PsycINFO Database Record

An ERP study on metacognitive monitoring processes in children.

Little is known about what exactly differentiates metacognitive processes from ordinary cognitive processes particularly early in development, and the underlying developmental aspects. To examine the time-course of metacognition, the present study investigated the neural underpinnings of judgments of learning (JoLs) and compared them with control judgments, using an event-related potentials (ERP) design. During ERP recording, children age seven to eight were presented with cue-target picture pairs and instructed to learn these pairs. After each pair, they either had to make a JoL (assess the likelihood of remembering the target when only presented with the cue) or a colour judgment (indicate whether the colour yellow had been present in one of the two pictures presented earlier). Results revealed a late slow wave divergence maximal pronounced from 550 ms to 950 ms post-stimulus that distinguished between JOLs and colour judgments. Over centro-parietal areas, JoLs showed a more negative going slow wave compared to the colour judgments, and this pattern was independent of performance. The results are in support of theories that assume a distinction between metacognitive and cognitive processes.

The Evolution of Primate Communication and Metacommunication.

Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion, they share with nonhuman primates the capacity to communicate in impulsive or habitual ways. They are also similarly able to monitor fluency, informativeness and relevance of messages or signals through nonconceptual cues.

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.

Social influence on metacognitive evaluations: The power of nonverbal cues.

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations. Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task, which was followed by a face randomly gazing towards or away from the response chosen by the participant. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation of their response by rating their confidence in their answer. In Experiment 1, the participants were told that the gaze direction was irrelevant to the task purpose and were advised to ignore it. The results revealed an effect of implicit social information on confidence ratings even though the gaze direction was random and therefore unreliable for task purposes. In addition, nonsocial cues (car) did not elicit this effect. In Experiment 2, the participants were led to believe that cue direction (face or car) reflected a previous participant's response to the same question-that is, the social information provided by the cue was made explicit, yet still objectively unreliable for the task. The results showed a similar social influence on confidence ratings, observed with both cues (car and face) but with an increased magnitude relative to Experiment 1. We additionally showed in Experiment 2 that social information impaired metacognitive accuracy. Together our results strongly suggest an involuntary susceptibility of metacognitive evaluations to nonverbal social information, even when it is implicit (Experiment 1) and unreliable (Experiments 1 and 2).

Neural correlates of judgments of learning - An ERP study on metacognition.

Metacognitive assessment of performance has been revealed to be one of the most powerful predictors of human learning success and academic achievement. Yet, little is known about the functional nature of cognitive processes supporting judgments of learning (JOLs). The present study investigated the neural underpinnings of JOLs, using event-related brain potentials. Participants were presented with picture pairs and instructed to learn these pairs. After each pair, participants received a task cue, which instructed them to make a JOL (the likelihood of remembering the target when only presented with the cue) or to make a control judgment. Results revealed that JOLs were accompanied by a positive slow wave over medial frontal areas and a bilateral negative slow wave over occipital areas between 350ms and 700ms following the task cue. The results are discussed with respect to recent accounts on the neural correlates of judgments of learning.

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.

Source unreliability decreases but does not cancel the impact of social information on metacognitive evaluations.

Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of social impact. Participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task that varied in difficulty. The task was followed by a video of a person who was presented as being either competent or incompetent at performing the task. That person provided random feedback to the participant through facial expressions indicating agreement, disagreement or uncertainty. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation by rating their confidence in their answer. Results revealed that participants' confidence was higher following agreements. Interestingly, this effect was merely reduced but not canceled for the incompetent individual, even though participants were able to perceive the individual's incompetence. Moreover, perceived agreement induced zygomaticus activity, but only when the feedback was provided for difficult trials by the competent individual. This last result strongly suggests that people implicitly appraise the relevance of social feedback with respect to their current goal. Together, our findings suggest that people always integrate social agreement into their metacognitive evaluations, even when epistemic vigilance mechanisms alert them to the risk of being misinformed.

Does metacognition necessarily involve metarepresentation?

Against the view that metacognition is a capacity that parallels theory of mind, it is argued that metacognition need involve neither metarepresentation nor semantic forms of reflexivity, but only process-reflexivity, through which a task-specific system monitors its own internal feedback by using quantitative cues. Metacognitive activities, however, may be redescribed in metarepresentational, mentalistic terms in species endowed with a theory of mind.

The medium helps the message: Early sensitivity to auditory fluency in children's endorsement of statements.

Recently, a growing number of studies have investigated the cues used by children to selectively accept testimony. In parallel, several studies with adults have shown that the fluency with which information is provided influences message evaluation: adults evaluate fluent information as more credible than dysfluent information. It is therefore plausible that the fluency of a message could also influence children's endorsement of statements. Three experiments were designed to test this hypothesis with 3- to 5-year-olds where the auditory fluency of a message was manipulated by adding different levels of noise to recorded statements. The results show that 4 and 5-year-old children, but not 3-year-olds, are more likely to endorse a fluent statement than a dysfluent one. The present study constitutes a first attempt to show that fluency, i.e., ease of processing, is recruited as a cue to guide epistemic decision in children. An interpretation of the age difference based on the way cues are processed by younger children is suggested.

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

The current study examined early signs of implicit metacognitive monitoring in 3.5-year-old children. During a learning phase children had to learn paired associates. In the test phase, children performed a recognition task and choose the correct associate for a given target among four possible answers. Subsequently, children's explicit confidence judgments (CJs) and their fixation time allocation at the confidence scale were assessed. Analyses showed that explicit CJs did not differ for remembered compared to non-remembered items. In contrast, children's fixation patterns on the confidence scale were affected by the correctness of their memory, as children looked longer to high confidence ratings when they correctly remembered the associated item. Moreover, analyses of pupil size revealed pupil dilations for correctly remembered, but not incorrectly remembered items. The results converge with recent behavioral findings that reported evidence for implicit metacognitive memory monitoring processes in 3.5-year-old children. The study suggests that implicit metacognitive abilities might precede the development of explicit metacognitive knowledge.