Metacognition

(i) Explaining Metacognition

• Ability to reflect on, monitor, and control one's knowledge and thoughts (Flavell, 1979)

• "Thinking about how you are thinking"

• Similar to Theory of Mind

  • Theory of Mind: Reflecting on what others know

  • Metacognition: Reflecting on what you know

(ii) Explaining Metacognition - Tip of the Tongue

Tip-of-the-Tongue Effect = Metacognitive Feeling

• A form of metacognition (Schwartz & Metcalfe, 2011)

• Involves judgments about your own knowledge

• Can be implicit, not always conscious

• Illustrates the multi-faceted nature of metacognition

• Reflects on knowledge & certainty (e.g., how well you know something)

• Does not always involve specific content of knowledge

Models of Metacognition - Implicit

• Unconscious feelings of certainty/uncertainty about your knowledge

• Not limited to adults—young children & non-human animals can use certainty/uncertainty to guide responses (Beran et al., 2010)

• Certainty use varies across species

• Caution: Adults & animals may use this ability differently

Models of Metacognition - Explicit

• Conscious reflection on your own knowledge

• Flavell's Distinction (1979) for Explicit Metacognition

  • Declarative Metacognition:

    • Explicit knowledge about cognition, memory, learning

  • Procedural Metacognition:

    • Self-reflective processes for monitoring and regulating ongoing learning

Metacognition Overview

• Reflecting on your own knowledge and thinking

• Can be implicit (feelings of certainty/uncertainty) or explicit (conscious evaluation)

• Implicit Metacognition: Available to young children & animals

• Explicit Metacognition: More complex, primarily seen in adults

• Divided into multiple abilities, such as:

  • Implicit/Explicit

  • Declarative/Procedural

• Metacognition is multi-faceted and involves evaluating one’s own knowledge

Metacognition and Learning

• Reflect on your knowledge and compare it with a desired state

• Thinking about how well you know something is a metacognitive exercise

• Helps you become aware of how you are learning

• Key in self-regulation of learning (Schraw, Crippen, & Hartley, 2006)

• Important in cognitive psychology and educational research

Metacognition and Learning: Physical Movements

• Metacognition helps manage both physical movements and cognitive efforts

• Sangster-Jokic & Whitebread, 2014:

• Study: Metacognitive intervention for 8-year-olds with developmental coordination disorder

  • Four-step procedure: GOAL → PLAN → DO → CHECK

  • After metacognitive training, children improved at identifying areas needing improvement

Metacognition and Learning: Educational Benefits

• Learning is guided by judgements of what you know (Metcalfe, 2009)

• Your self-evaluation affects study choices

  • E.g., easier concepts studied first for quicker rewards (Kornell & Metcalfe, 2006)

  • Persistence with difficult concepts if progress is felt (Son, 2004)

Metacognition and Learning: Feedback

• Metacognition: Awareness of what you know and ability to regulate learning

• Used at multiple stages: before, during, and after a task

• Feedback use is a key metacognitive skill

• Feedback helps improve memory or skill-based errors

• Can also correct metacognitive errors (incorrect certainty/uncertainty)

  • E.g., correctly stating the end of WW1 as 1918 but unsure, just guessing

• Metacognitive errors are about overestimating or underestimating what you know

Feedback (Maniscalco & Lau, 2012)

• Type 1 Sensitivity: Actual accuracy (how correct you are)

• Type 2 Sensitivity: Ability to evaluate certainty about performance (how likely you are to be correct)

• High Type 1, Low Type 2: Get answers right but poor at knowing when you're correct

• Low Type 1, High Type 2: May not get many answers right, but good at knowing when you're guessing vs. correct

Metacognitive Feedback

• Type 1 Sensitivity: Good at getting answers correct

• Type 2 Sensitivity: Poor at knowing when you're correct

• Purpose of feedback:

  • Correct answers and identify when you knew them

  • Highlight both mistakes and successes (Metcalfe, 2017)

• Feedback helps:

  • Identify mistakes easily

  • Be more confident when correct

  • Recognize things done well (Butler, Karpicke, & Roediger, 2008)

• Feedback improves both Type 1 and Type 2 sensitivity

Metacognition and Learning: Hyper-Correction

• Hyper-correction effect: People more likely to correct answers they are certain about when shown they are wrong; do not learn well from feedback on guesses

• Misplaced certainty can lead to benefits in correcting mistakes

• Feedback helps reflect on both performance and certainty about knowledge (Metcalfe, 2017)

• Hyper-correction effects:

  • Increased tendency to change one's mind when shown they were wrong

  • This change can happen unconsciously and cause disconcerting effects

• Important to admit when you don't know something well

Metacognition and Learning: Opinion Change

• Study by Wolfe & Williams (2017):

  • Adults read texts supporting or opposing their opinion on smacking children

  • After reading, participants' opinions became more moderate if they read disagreeing texts

  • When recalling previous opinions, they remembered them as more moderate than they were

• Key finding:

  • People can change their opinions without being aware of it

  • They may perceive their past beliefs as more similar to their current ones

Metacognition and Learning: Unconscious Belief Change

• Belief change can happen without realizing it (Wolfe & Williams, 2017)

• Effortful cognitive control is hard to maintain (Diamond, 2013)

• Be cautious about what you think and why you think it

• Metacognition helps avoid unconscious belief change by promoting reflection on what you know

Metacognition, Executive Functions, & Theory of Mind

• Metacognition is linked to Theory of Mind and executive functions

• Executive functions and explicit metacognition share:

  • Higher-order cognitive processes

  • Willful action and self-regulation

  • Steady improvement throughout childhood

  • Related to pre-frontal cortex activity (Fernandez-Duque, Baird, & Posner, 2000)

Roebers (2017): Executive Functions, Metacognition, & Theory of Mind

• Few studies link executive functions and metacognition, despite their conceptual connection

• Theory of Mind may moderate this link

  • Allows holding different beliefs about what you know vs. what others know

  • Metacognitive ability: Contrast current knowledge with desired knowledge

• Meta-representational skill: Ability to compare what you know now to what you want to know, key for both Theory of Mind and metacognition (Roebers, 2017)

Flavell (2000): Metacognition, Executive Functions, & Theory of Mind

• Strong links between metacognition and Theory of Mind

  • Metacognition: How do I know something?

  • Theory of Mind: How do others know things?

• Flavell worked on both concepts, highlighting their connection

• Metacognition evolves from implicit feelings to explicit reflection

• Young children:

  • Have implicit knowledge of what they and others know

  • Struggle with understanding how they know things

• Challenge:

  • Overcoming difficulties with intrusive knowledge takes time

  • Explicit metacognition tasks are hard for young children to pass

Gollek & Doherty (2016): Metacognition, Executive Functions, & Theory of Mind

• Explored the relationship between Theory of Mind and metacognition

• False-belief understanding may involve the same meta-representational skills as metacognition

• Also linked to the ability to understand multiple labels for a familiar object (e.g., dog, ink, chienne)

Gollek & Doherty (2016): Children's Understanding of Words & False-Belief Task

• False-belief task: Children who passed were better at recognizing different words for the same object

• Disambiguation task:

  • Recognizing that "Kulde" could mean glasses, without assuming a new word means a new object

• Pragmatic Cue task:

  • Children who passed the false-belief task better matched the object when given a made-up label ("Nohle")

Gollek & Doherty (2016): Children Passing False-Belief Tasks

• More likely to understand: Two different words can refer to the same object (e.g., "glasses" and "Kulde")

• Use pragmatic cues: Use context to determine what a novel label refers to (e.g., "Nohle" → food item, not a non-food object)

• Meta-representations: Ability to form them supports both metacognition and Theory of Mind in social contexts (e.g., figuring out what others mean)

Roebers (2017): Development of Metacognition in Childhood

• Metacognition is a multi-faceted construct

• Children show different metacognitive elements at different ages

• Progression from 2 to 6 years:

  • 2 years: Begin using behaviors to regulate information

  • 3-4 years: Regulate knowledge and become sensitive to task difficulty

  • 5-6 years: Improve at recognizing when they don’t know something

(i) Delgado, Gomez, & Sarria (2011): Pointing (Social vs. Private)

• Social pointing: Used to direct or grab others' attention

• Private pointing: Self-regulatory behavior for problem-solving or memory

• Study (2-4 years old):

  • Children had to remember where a toy was hidden

  • Showed private pointing when left alone with a task

  • Younger children who pointed privately did worse on the memory task than older children

(ii) Delgado, Gomez, & Sarria (2011): Pointing (Social vs. Private)

• Private pointing in 2-year-olds linked to better memory task performance

  • Helps when memory resources are limited

  • Used by children who struggled most on the task to succeed

• Pointing: A physical way to rehearse information before doing it mentally

• Younger children (2-year-olds) can partially track their knowledge and take steps to improve performance

Bernard, Proust, & Clement (2015): Development of Metacognition in Childhood

• 5-year-olds were asked to identify blurred pictures and guess what they were

• Children were more accurate in identifying items they thought they could recognize

• Type 2 sensitivity: Preschoolers could identify how well they knew things

• If Type 2 sensitivity is a metacognitive skill, it involves meta-representation, like ToM

• Children at the same age typically fail a classic false-belief task

Development of Metacognition in Childhood

• Toddlers can use metacognitive feelings like tip-of-the-tongue and feelings of certainty/uncertainty (Beran et al., 2010)

• Task impurity: Success requires more than the ability the task is designed to measure; common problem in cognitive development tasks

  • Classic false-belief tasks show task impurity, explaining why young children struggle

  • Example: Unexpected-contents task (Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987)

(Bradford, Jentzsch, & Gomez, 2015)

• ask type: Theory of Mind task → remembering past beliefs vs current beliefs

• Key distinction:

  • Self-oriented ToM → Metacognition

  • Other-oriented ToM → understanding others’ beliefs

• Development:

  • Difficult for children under 4–5 years

• Typical finding:

  • Young children claim they’ve always known what they know now (Taylor et al., 1994)

• Implication:

  • Pre-schoolers struggle to explicitly reflect on their own knowledge

• Note:

  • Bradford et al. review this issue, but study mainly focuses on adults

(i) Development of Metacognition in Childhood: Birch & Bloom (2007)

• Task: Adult participants assign probabilities to search locations in a false-belief task

• Scenario:

  • Vicki unaware that Denise moved the violin to the red box, and that box locations have changed

  • Participants expect the blue box to be searched most likely, then the red box (because it was in the blue box’s old location)

• Key finding:

  • Knowing the violin’s location affects participants' judgments of where Denise is likely to search, even though Denise doesn’t know it’s there

• Result:

  • Participants' ratings are influenced by their own knowledge of the violin’s location

(ii) Development of Metacognition in Childhood: Birch & Bloom (2007)

• Ignorance Condition:

  • We don’t know where the violin is hidden

• Knowledge-Plausible Condition:

  • Told the violin is in the red box, which moves to the blue box’s original location

• Knowledge-Implausible Condition:

  • Told the violin is in the purple box, not moved to the blue box’s old spot

• Key Point:

  • The red box's location is significant because it was Vicki's original hiding place

• Finding:

  • In knowledge-plausible condition, knowing where the violin is influences judgments about where Vicki will search

(iii) Development of Metacognition in Childhood: Birch & Bloom (2007)

• Effect of knowing the violin’s location:

  • Made people more likely to say Vicki would look in the red box

  • Only in the knowledge-plausible condition

• Key factor:

  • Merely knowing the location wasn’t enough—plausible reason needed

  • Example: It makes sense that Vicki would check her original hiding spot

• Conclusion:

  • Intrusive knowledge can affect judgments when it seems relevant

  • Adults can be influenced by it in Theory of Mind tasks

  • Children struggle with inhibiting this knowledge, complicating false-belief tasks

Development of Metacognition

• Schneider (2008):

  • Metacognitive skills become more efficient from pre-school to adolescence

  • Young children have some metacognitive ability, but it improves with age

• Whitebread et al. (2005):

  • CINDLE project: 3- to 5-year-olds in an independent learner training program

  • These children were more likely to show independent learning by the end of the year

Development of Metacognition in Childhood

• Pre-schoolers:

  • Show metacognitive skills in spontaneous, private behaviors (Delgado et al., 2011)

• Teaching Metacognition:

  • Children under 5 can be taught metacognitive strategies for future learning (Whitebread et al., 2005)

• Education:

  • Metacognition is not automatically acquired in mainstream education and may need to be explicitly taught (Annevirta & Vauras, 2006)

Interim Summary 3 - Metacognition in Young Children

• Metacognitive skills:

  • Young children (as early as 2 years) show skills like private pointing to regulate behavior

• Development:

  • Pre-schoolers develop Type 2 sensitivity and can become aware of what they know

• Challenges:

  • Explicit metacognition is difficult due to tasks involving intrusive knowledge (e.g., false-belief tasks)

• Training:

  • Young preschoolers can be trained to increase awareness of their own knowledge and practice independent learning