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Correlations between confidence and social judgments controlling for age. Data plotted are standardized residuals
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The world can be a confusing place, which leads to a significant challenge: how do we figure out what is true? To accomplish this, children possess two relevant skills: reasoning about the likelihood of their own accuracy (metacognitive confidence) and reasoning about the likelihood of others' accuracy (mindreading). Guided by Signal Detection Theo...
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Although it is well established that our thinking can often be biased, the precise cognitive mechanisms underlying these biases are still debated. The present study builds on recent research showing that biased reasoners often seem aware that their reasoning is incorrect; they show signs of conflict detection. One important shortcoming in this rese...
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... Simulation theory investigates whether self-oriented and otheroriented talents are identical, depending on a singular cognitive process. Signal detection theory posits that confidence in a judgement is solely based on the imprecision of that decision, forecasting a strong link between decision accuracy and confidence [31]. Centrality and density both are low in the third quadrant, indicating the developmental immaturity and the absence of a robust primary theme. ...
In recent years, significant advancements in cognitive performance through metacognition have been observed, with self-esteem positively impacting individuals' lives and subjective well-being. This has led researchers to conduct comprehensive studies across metacognition, psychology, neuroscience, and related fields. As comprehension metacognition advances, there is a growing consensus that academics require interdisciplinary approaches. This work uses the Biblioshiny package in R to do a scientometric review of the global research landscape concerning metacognition and self, forecasts its future trajectory, and offers references for pertinent domestic research from global source journals. The findings demonstrate that spearheaded by the USA, the United Kingdom, Italy, and other nations, international metacognition research has established a comprehensive framework, encompassing a “descriptive analysis of cognitive development” and a “practical investigation of metacognitive belief intervention.” In the future, while emphasising these two research categories, the empathetic capabilities of individuals may be considered to enhance metacognitive beliefs and the overall wealth of life.
... Theory of mind and metacognition, although distinct, are thought to share underlying mechanisms and have been linked to the development of selective learning (see Baer, Malik, & Odic, 2021;Flavell, 2000;Lockl & Schneider, 2006;Perner, 1991). Perner (1991) argued that the prerequisite skill for both abilities is the representation of abstract concepts such as thoughts in one's mind. ...
... Resendes et al. (2021) reported that although explicit metacognition was not linked to selective learning, implicit measures were. Finally, this relationship was not found in a recent study by Baer et al. (2021). Clearly, more research is needed to confirm and expand these findings. ...
Young children are often dependent on learning from others and to this effect develop heuristics to help distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources. Where younger children rely heavily on social cues such as familiarity with a source to make this distinction, older children tend to rely more on an informant’s competence. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that help children to select the best informant; however, some evidence points toward mechanisms such as metacognition (thinking about thinking) and theory of mind (thinking about other’s thoughts) being involved. The goals of the current study were to (a) explore how the monitoring and control components of metacognition may predict selective social learning in preschoolers and (b) 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 experiments’ 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. The implications regarding the kind of tasks used to measure metacognition are discussed.
... Particularly relevant to our question here are recent findings that children strategically choose to answer items with higher chances of success. When given the option to select from a pair of perceptual quantity comparisons (e.g., which set has more dots, or which shape is bigger), 5-9-year-old children generally chose those featuring larger, easier ratios that they were more likely to answer correctly (Baer et al., 2021;Baer & Odic, 2019). Children therefore seem able to estimate their individual relative chances of success and enact a simple strategy to maximize that success. ...
... The number task we used has recently been used in studies about children's solo strategies, but with limited success in children under age 5 (e.g., Baer & Odic, 2019). In contrast, 4-year-olds applied the same strategies on area discrimination (identifying the larger of two shapes), a dimension that shows earlier and more rapid development than number (Baer et al., 2021;Odic, 2018). Therefore, the apparent failure of 4year-olds in Experiment 3 may have more to do with children's difficulty discriminating the difficulties rather than not understanding the strategy. ...
Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016–2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self‐serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third‐party collaborative task did 5‐year‐olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self‐serving bias.
The longitudinal relation between toddlers' behaviors in uncertain situations (e.g., information seeking, hesitation) and preschoolers' uncertainty monitoring was investigated (between 2014 and 2019 in Northern California; Time 1: N = 183, M = 28.99 months, 53% female, 67.8% White; Time 2: N = 159, M = 41.64 months, 52.2% female). Eye movements and response latencies were recorded as children identified a target from two partially occluded (Time 1) or degraded (Time 2) images. Confidence ratings for identifications were collected at Time 2. At Time 1, gaze transitions between response options, but not response latencies and mental state language, predicted Time 2 uncertainty monitoring. Overall, these findings provide the first direct evidence of connections between toddlers' uncertainty behaviors and preschoolers' uncertainty monitoring.
Developing an accurate model of another agent’s knowledge is central to communication and cooperation between agents. In this article, we propose a hierarchical framework of knowledge assessment that explains how people construct mental models of their own knowledge and the knowledge of others. Our framework posits that people integrate information about their own and others’ knowledge via Bayesian inference. To evaluate this claim, we conduct an experiment in which participants repeatedly assess their own performance (a metacognitive task) and the performance of another person (a type of theory of mind task) on the same image classification tasks. We contrast the hierarchical framework with simpler alternatives that assume different degrees of differentiation between mental models of self and others. Our model accurately captures participants’ assessment of their own performance and the performance of others in the task: Initially, people rely on their own self-assessment process to reason about the other person’s performance, leading to similar self- and other-performance predictions. As more information about the other person’s ability becomes available, the mental model for the other person becomes increasingly distinct from the mental model of self. Simulation studies also confirm that our framework explains a wide range of findings about human knowledge assessment of themselves and others.
Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review developmental evidence that this metacognitive strategy does not require reportable processing. Uncertainty prompts nonverbal human infants and nonhuman animals to engage in strategies like seeking help, searching for additional information, or opting out. Certainty directs children’s attention and active learning strategies and provides a common metric for comparing and integrating conflicting beliefs across people. We conclude that certainty is a continuous, domain-general signal of belief quality even early in life.