Do I Know What They Know? Linking Metacognition, Theory of Mind, and Selective Social Learning

Abstract

Young children are often dependent upon learning from others and to this effect develop heuristics to help distinguish reliable from unreliable sources. Where younger children rely heavily on social cues such as familiarity with a source to make this distinction, older ones tend to rely more on an informant’s competence (Tong et al., 2020). Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that help children select the best informant, however some evidence points towards mechanisms such as metacognition (thinking about thinking) and theory of mind (thinking about other’s thoughts) being involved. The goals of the present study were to 1) explore how the monitoring and control components of metacognition may predict selective social learning in preschoolers and 2) to 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 experiment’s 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.

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

“…Among these secondary behaviors, there must surely be some reflection on their metacognitive states (e.g., pupil dilation, Paulus et al 2013;Lempert et al 2015;eye-blinks, Declerek et al 2006;selfscratching, cf. Yamanashi & Matsuzawa 2010;eye movements;Bethell-Fox et al 1984;Roderer & Roebers 2014;and head tilting;Dutemple et al, 2022). The search and examination of such spontaneous metacognitive behaviors would provide new directions for comparative-cognitive studies on metacognition (Nakao & Goto 2015).…”