The role of declarative and procedural metamemory in event-based prospective memory in school-aged children

“I’ll remember everything no matter what!”: The role of metacognitive abilities in the development of young children’s prospective memory

“…PM and executive functioning are significantly positively correlated during early and middle childhood (e.g., Atance & Jackson, 2009;Ford, Driscoll, Shum, & Macaulay, 2012;Mahy & Moses, 2011), and (as outlined earlier in this article) procedural metamemory and PM are positively related as well (Cottini, Basso, & Palladino, 2018;Kvavilashvili & Ford, 2014;Spiess et al, 2015Spiess et al, , 2016. It is possible that for executive functions to enhance PM performance, children first must be aware of the limitations of their memory, knowledge, and abilities in order to effectively recruit executive abilities when necessary in a PM task (in line with predictions of the PAM and multiprocess theories of PM).…”

“…Thus, it remains an open question whether children's PM predictions and postdictions are sensitive to task difficulty prior to any experience with the PM task. Second, there is limited research comparing predictions and postdictions of PM and RM performance during early childhood given that many studies have investigated either predictions or postdictions of RM or PM in young children (e.g., Cottini et al, 2018;Kvavilashvili & Ford, 2014). To our knowledge, no study has compared predictions and postdictions of children's PM and RM across the preschool years.…”

Do verbal reminders improve preschoolers’ prospective memory performance? It depends on age and individual differences

“…Perhaps children with better executive functioning are better able to engage these abilities when they are reminded to do so. In fact, findings from the metacognitive awareness literature suggest that 8-year-olds with higher meta-memory knowledge perform better on a PM task (Cottini, Basso, & Palladino, 2018) suggesting that greater awareness of memory and memory strategies is related to superior PM performance. Similarly, Kvavilashvili and Ford (2014) found that 5-year-olds had high accuracy in predicting their PM performance suggesting that meta-memory for PM is in place early in development.…”

The Cost of Prospective Memory in Children: The Role of Cue Focality

“…Kvavilashvili and Ford (2014), for example, found that PM performance was more accurate in children who better predicted their own performance. More recently, Cottini et al (2018) found better performance in a categorical PM task in children with high declarative metamemory (relative to children with low metamemory). Importantly, metamemory was found to have no effect on the specific PM task, which is thought to be less demanding than the categorical task.…”

“…The experimental tasks used here were adapted from standard PM tasks used in previous studies with children (Mahy et al, 2014; Cottini et al, 2018). Before conducting the present experiment, a pilot study with ten 6-year-old children and ten 11-year-old children was carried out to ensure that children of these ages were able to successfully perform the focal and non-focal conditions and that we were able to obtain levels of performance similar to those of previous experiments.…”