Three‐year‐old children can access their own memory to guide responses on a visual matching task

Abstract

Many models of learning rely on accessing internal knowledge states. Yet, although infants and young children are recognized to be proficient learners, the ability to act on metacognitive information is not thought to develop until early school years. In the experiments reported here, 3.5-year-olds demonstrated memory-monitoring skills by responding on a non-verbal task originally developed for non-human animals, in which they had to access their knowledge states. Children learned a set of paired associates, and were given the option to skip uncertain trials on a recognition memory test. Accuracy for accepted items was significantly higher than for skipped on a subsequent memory task that included all items. Additionally, children whose memory-monitoring assessments more closely matched actual memory performance showed superior overall learning, suggesting a correlation between memory-monitoring and memory itself. The results suggest that children may have implicit access to internal knowledge states at very young ages, providing an explanation for how they are able to guide learning, even as infants.

Development of Meta-Representations: Procedural Metacognition and the Relationship to Theory of Mind

“…We therefore propose that children's ability to form fully conscious meta-representations about others' and own mental states may underlie this link (Flavell, 2003); and this might be what we found in our results. In this line of argumentation, the present results may indicate a transition from an implicit to an additionally, more differentiated explicit metacognitive monitoring system at a certain age range (Balcomb & Gerken, 2008), including fully conscious meta-representation. And in that view, monitoring skills must not necessarily rely on meta-representation but could also be based on feelings or www.ccsenet.org/jedp…”

“…This interpretation is speculative at this point but indirectly supported by results suggesting that children at very young ages already have (at least implicit) access to internal knowledge states, providing an explanation for how they are able to guide learning (Balcomb & Gerken, 2008;Lyons & Ghetti, 2013). In that view, future research should address the question whether early (implicit) declarative metacognition skills can predict later ToM competencies as well.…”

“…However, as these studies focused on declarative metacognitive knowledge, the question about the relation between procedural metacognition (monitoring) and ToM is still unanswered. Some authors have argued, based on findings concerning relatively good uncertainty monitoring skills in non-human primates (Call, 2010;Beran, Smith, & Perdue, 2013;Washburn, Gulledge, Beran, & Smith, 2010); as well as in infants and toddlers (Balcomb & Gerken, 2008), that for monitoring, no meta-representation of one`s performance in the task at hand is necessary. In other words, it has been argued that procedural metacognition may only rely on perceptual inputs and an ambiguity thereof rather than requiring the ability to reflect on one`s certainty or uncertainty (Lyons & Ghetti, 2010.…”

“…meta-representations, at older ages (Balcomb & Gerken, 2008). Similarly, Flavell (2003) suggested different levels of metacognitive monitoring awareness ranging from unconscious uncertainty-certainty responses to fully self-aware uncertainty-certainty responses.…”

How Can Reading Comprehension Strategies and Recall Be Improved in Elementary School Students?

“…Chall s model underestimates the students' comprehension capacities by stating that during the first four stages (until 4th-8th grades) the students only develop their decoding skills. However, empirical studies show that before the age of 6, children show self-regulated speech and behaviors that demonstrate the use of planning, monitoring-control and evaluation strategies (Balcomb & Gerken, 2008;Bronson, 2000;Bull, Espy, & Wiebe, 2008;Garner & Bochna, 2004;Whitebread & Basilio, 2012).…”