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

Approximating the ZPD? Young children's judgements of appropriate task level for learning

This research examined how 3-6-year-olds judge appropriate levels of counting games based on a person's ability, desire for learning and degree of difficulty. Study 1 found that 3-year-olds did not consider a character's ability or desire, whereas older children gave high ability characters large number games and low ability characters small number games when the characters wanted to play a manageable game. However, older children gave large number games to characters who wanted to learn counting, regardless of their ability. In Study 2, in addition to a similar developmental change of jointly considering a character's ability and desire, it was found that 5-and 6-year-olds were more sensitive to the degree of difficulty. They were more careful than younger children to choose exceedingly large number games given the character's ability and desire. Implications for children's understanding of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and goal orientation are discussed.

Can you accurately monitor your behaviors while multitasking? The effect of multitasking on metacognition

With the pace of life accelerating, multitasking has become the norm in daily life. According to research, multiple cognitive processes, including numerical reasoning, comprehension, and writing, are negatively affected by multitasking. However, only a few studies have investigated the relationship between multitasking and metacognition. In this study, the effect of multitasking on metacognition was examined using a prospective monitoring paradigm (prediction of subsequent recall performance). In Experiment 1, the participants simultaneously studied word pairs (primary task) and differentiated between different sound pitches (secondary task) and then predicted their performance in a subsequent memory test for the studied word pairs (prospective metacognitive monitoring). The accuracy of metacognitive evaluation with multitasking was then compared with that without multitasking. In Experiment 2, sounds and icons of real-life applications were used to improve the ecological validity of the experiment in the secondary task. The results indicated that multitasking impaired metacognition in both artificial and real-life simulated scenarios. In addition, the participants who engaged in more media multitasking in their daily lives exhibited poorer metacognitive monitoring abilities in single tasks.

A review of procedural and declarative metamemory development across childhood

Metamemory is a component of metacognition that includes both the knowledge of factors that affect memory (i.e. declarative metamemory) and knowledge and application of factors in one's own learning and recall performance (i.e. procedural metamemory). The current paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of studies examining metamemory ability development from preschool into adolescence in order to improve the understanding of metamemory, its developmental course, and the available assessment methods. We examined the developmental trajectory of procedural and declarative metamemory abilities for both typically developing children and clinical populations. We found procedural metamemory abilities emerge around 4 to 5 years old, and significantly improve across childhood and into adulthood, although less is known about metamemory development across adolescence in typically developing children. Additionally, metamemory abilities vary significantly based on clinical pathology, although relatively fewer studies have examined these abilities in children with neurodevelopmental disorders or other neurologic conditions, such as acquired brain injury. The methods of metamemory assessment varied significantly across studies as well, indicating a need for a standardized metamemory measure, which would have high utility for clinical care.

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.