Examining implicit metacognition in 3.5-year-old children: an eye-tracking and pupillometric study

The current study examined early signs of implicit metacognitive monitoring in 3.5-year-old children. During a learning phase children had to learn paired associates. In the test phase, children performed a recognition task and choose the correct associate for a given target among four possible answers. Subsequently, children's explicit confidence judgments (CA) and their fixation time allocation at the confidence scale were assessed. Analyses showed that explicit CJs did not differ for remembered compared to non-remembered items. In contrast, children's fixation patterns on the confidence scale were affected by the correctness of their memory, as children looked longer to high confidence ratings when they correctly remembered the associated item. Moreover, analyses of pupil size revealed pupil dilations for correctly remembered, but not incorrectly remembered items. The results converge with recent behavioral findings that reported evidence for implicit metacognitive memory monitoring processes in 3.5-year-old children. The study suggests that implicit metacognitive abilities might precede the development of explicit metacognitive knowledge

12-and 24-Month-Old Infants' Search Behavior Under Informational Uncertainty

Infants register and react to informational uncertainty in the environment. They also form expectations about the probability of future events as well as update the expectation according to changes in the environment. A novel line of research has started to investigate infants' and toddlers' behavior under uncertainty. By combining these research areas, the present research investigated 12- and 24-month-old infants' searching behaviors under varying degree of informational uncertainty. An object was hidden in one of three possible locations and probabilistic information about the hiding location was manipulated across trials. Infants' time delay in search initiation for a hidden object linearly increased across the level of informational uncertainty. Infants' successful searching also varied according to probabilistic information. The findings suggest that infants modulate their behaviors based on probabilistic information. We discuss the possibility that infants' behavioral reaction to the environmental uncertainty constitutes the basis for the development of subjective uncertainty

Diagrams support revision of prior belief in primary-school children

The reluctance of children to revise their prior beliefs is a prominent phenomenon in the reasoning literature. One way to facilitate belief change is offering explanations, and this study examined whether highlighting (counter)evidence with diagrams leads to belief revision to the same extent. Altogether 134 preschoolers and second-graders (5- and 7-year-olds, respectively) were presented with either counterintuitive data or explanations, both refuting a strong commonly held belief concerning the relation between two variables (e.g. eating carrots improves vision). In the explanation condition, we presented children with an explanatory underlying mechanism for the unexpected causal relation (e.g. spinach and carrots contain the same amount of vitamin A, with both improving vision). In the diagram condition, children were presented with empirical data displayed in a bar graph (non-covariation), which also disconfirmed the initial belief. In both age groups and both conditions we found significant numbers of belief revision with high certainty ratings concerning the new belief. Belief change was more pronounced in second-graders, who in addition showed significantly more changes in the diagram condition than in the explanation condition. These findings suggest that the perceptual saliency of (counter)evidence helps children to correctly evaluate hypotheses, which supports changes in their prior belief

How Does Children’s Theory of Mind Become Explicit? A Review of Longitudinal Findings

How does theory of mind become explicit? In this article, we provide a brief overview of theoretical accounts and then review longitudinal findings on the development of theory of mind from infancy to the preschool years. Long‐term predictive relations among conceptually related measures of implicit and explicit theory‐of‐mind reasoning support a conceptual continuity view of the transition from an implicit to an explicit understanding of the mind. We discuss alternative, minimalist accounts of infant psychological reasoning (e.g., two‐systems models, submentalizing theory) and their implications for the development of theory of mind in light of the evidence. Longitudinal findings further support a developmental enrichment view of joint attention as a foundation of theory of mind and early social interaction as a powerful mechanism in the development of this ability. Finally, we highlight the importance of longitudinal data for our understanding of conceptual development from infancy to the preschool years

Developmental Trajectories in Diagnostic Reasoning: Understanding Data Are Confounded Develops Independently of Choosing Informative Interventions to Resolve Confounded Data

Two facets of diagnostic reasoning related to scientific thinking are recognizing the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence and selecting appropriate interventions that could provide learners the evidence necessary to make an appropriate causal conclusion (i.e., the control-of-variables strategy). The present study investigates both these abilities in 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 57). We found both competence and developmental progress in the capacity to recognize that evidence is confounded. Similarly, children performed above chance in some tasks testing for the selection of a controlled test of a hypothesis. However, these capacities were unrelated, suggesting that preschoolers' nascent understanding of the control-of-variables strategy may not be driven by a metacognitive understanding that confounded evidence does not support a unique causal conclusion, and requires further investigation

Young Children's Sensitivity to Their Own Ignorance in Informing Others

Prior research suggests that young children selectively inform others depending on others' knowledge states. Yet, little is known whether children selectively inform others depending on their own knowledge states. To explore this issue, we manipulated 3-to 4-year-old children's knowledge about the content of a box and assessed the impact on their decisions to inform another person. Moreover, we assessed the presence of uncertainty gestures while they inform another person in light of the suggestions that children's gestures reflect early developing, perhaps transient, epistemic sensitivity. Finally, we compared children's performance in the informing context to their explicit verbal judgment of their knowledge states to further confirm the existence of a performance gap between the two tasks. In their decisions to inform, children tend to accurately assess their ignorance, whereas they tend to overestimate their own knowledge states when asked to explicitly report them. Moreover, children display different levels of uncertainty gestures depending on the varying degrees of their informational access. These findings suggest that children's implicit awareness of their own ignorance may be facilitated in a social, communicative context

Reasoning With Conditionals About Everyday and Mathematical Concepts in Primary School

A research link between conditional reasoning and mathematics has been reported only for late adolescents and adults, despite claims about the pivotal importance of conditional reasoning, i.e., reasoning with if-then statements, in mathematics. Secondary students' problems with deductive reasoning in mathematics have been documented for a long time. However, evidence from developmental psychology shows that even elementary students possess some early conditional reasoning skills in familiar contexts. It is still an open question to what extent conditional reasoning with mathematical concepts differs from conditional reasoning in familiar everyday contexts. Based on Mental Model Theory (MMT) of conditional reasoning, we assume that (mathematical) content knowledge will influence the generation of models, when conditionals concern mathematical concepts. In a cross-sectional study, 102 students in Cyprus from grades 2, 4, and 6 solved four conditional reasoning tasks on each type of content (everyday and mathematical). All four logical forms, modus ponens (MP), modus tollens (MT), denial of the antecedent (DA), and affirmation of the consequent (AC), were included in each task. Consistent with previous findings, even second graders were able to make correct inferences on some logical forms. Controlling for Working Memory (WM), there were significant effects of grade and logical form, with stronger growth on MP and AC than on MT and DA. The main effect of context was not significant, but context interacted significantly with logical form and grade level. The pattern of results was not consistent with the predictions of MMT. Based on analyses of students' chosen responses, we propose an alternative mechanism explaining the specific pattern of results. The study indicates that deductive reasoning skills arise from a combination of knowledge of domain-general principles and domain-specific knowledge. It extends results concerning the gradual development of primary students' conditional reasoning with everyday concepts to reasoning with mathematical concepts adding to our understanding of the link between mathematics and conditional reasoning in primary school. The results inspire the development of educational interventions, while further implications and limitations of the study are discussed

The impact of theory of mind and executive function on math and reading abilities: A longitudinal study

Both theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning have been related to children's academic abilities. In a longitudinal study with 112 children, we investigated the influence of these two abilities on children's math and reading performance at 7 years of age. We found that math performance was predicted by concurrent working memory as well as by preschool numerical abilities and ToM. Reading performance was predicted by concurrent working memory and verbal IQ at 6 years. This corroborates earlier research demonstrating the importance of executive functioning (working memory) and ToM for later academic abilities. We argue that ToM may be an important developmental precursor of math performance because both require an understanding of representations

Scientific Reasoning in Biology – the Impact of Domain-General and Domain-Specific Concepts on Children’s Observation Competency

Research on the development of scientific reasoning has put the main focus on children's experimentation skills, in particular on the control-of-variables strategy. However, there are more scientific methods than just experimentation. Observation is defined as an independent scientific method that includes not only the description of what is observed, but also all phases of the scientific inquiry, such as questioning, hypothesizing, testing, and interpreting. Previous research has shown that the quality of observations depends on specific knowledge in the domain. We argue that observation competency shares the domain-general ability to differentiate hypotheses from evidence with other scientific methods. The present study investigates the relations of both domain-general scientific thinking and domain-specific knowledge in biology with observation competency in grade K children. We tested relations between observation competency, domain-general scientific reasoning, domain-specific knowledge, and language abilities of 75 children (age 4;9 to 6;7). Both scientific reasoning and domain-specific knowledge proved to be significant predictors of observation competency, explaining 35% of the variance. In a mediation analysis, we found a significant indirect effect of language via these two predictors. Thus, the present results indicate that observation skills require not only domain-specific knowledge but also domain-general scientific reasoning abilities