Developmental changes in uncertainty monitoring during an event recall task

The present study was conducted to examine developmental progression in children’s metacognitive monitoring competencies in the context of a complex memory task. 7- and 9-year-olds rated their confidence after answering questions in two different question formats (unbiased and misleading) and two different question types (answerable and unanswerable). Feeling-of-knowing judgments were gathered for questions that had previously been answered with “don’t know.” The results showed that children from both age groups appropriately differentiated between correct and incorrect answers to unbiased questions in their confidence judgments, between answerable and unanswerable questions, and appropriately showed lower confidence levels in their confidence judgments than in their feeling-of-knowing judgments. 9-year-olds proved to be further able to discriminate metacognitively between correct and incorrect answers to misleading answerable questions in their confidence judgments while 7-year-olds were not. The comparison of feeling-of-knowing judgments before correct and incorrect recognition indicated that metacognitive differentiation at the lower end of the uncertainty–certainty continuum posed problems for these age groups. The observation of an adult confederate modeling appropriate metamemory monitoring did not improve children’s metacognitive performance.

Nicole von der LindenEmail: