Does Implicit Metacognition Provide a Tool for Self-Guided Learning in Preschool Children?

Does Implicit Metacognition Provide a Tool for Self-Guided Learning in Preschool Children? Frances Balcomb (francesb@u.arizona.edu) Department of Psychology, 1303 E University Blvd Tucson, AZ 85719 USA LouAnn Gerken (gerken@u.arizona.edu) Department of Psychology, 1303 E University Blvd Tucson, AZ 85719 USA Abstract Many core cognitive processes, such as associative learning, are thought to appear early in infancy and develop rapidly throughout childhood, while more complex processes such as metacognition are thought to appear significantly later. However, there is an apparent paradox in that the rapid growth in cognitive development cannot be explained by passive learning mechanisms only, yet for children to actively guide their own learning, they must be at least somewhat self-referential. In the experiments reported here, metacognition was assessed using non-verbal tasks originally developed for non-human animals. Children aged 3.5 were able to demonstrate metacognition by strategically responding on a task in which they had to access their knowledge states. In addition, results indicate that children whose metacognitive assessments more closely matched their actual memory performance also showed superior overall learning compared to children whose metacognitive assessments were less accurate, suggesting that metamemory skill is correlated with memory itself. The results imply that metacognition may be intrinsically related to core cognitive processes and implicitly emergent in children as the processes themselves emerge, providing an explanation for how they are able to guide learning, even as infants. Introduction A key component of learning involves seeking out and encoding of new information and avoiding relearning already known information. In fact, people are active learners, and the ability to guide learning allows selectivity and efficiency; without it, reliance on passive mechanisms would result in redundancy, disorganization, coding of circumstantial but unrelated conjunctions, and slow learning of significant ones. For example, in language paradigms there is evidence that adults are able to use sensitivity to different types of information (such as perceptual salience, co-occurrence, or predictive values) in ongoing stimulus streams to optimize learning depending on the characteristics of the input (Gomez, 2002). We know, too, that infants are especially good at selective learning at very early ages. Indeed, infants' differential preference for what is novel vs. what is familiar in commonly-used testing methods is typically attributed to their seeking an optimal level of new and old information to promote learning (Hunter, Ames, & Koopman, 1983). Rather than being merely associative learners and pattern matchers, they can select ‘good’ from ‘bad’ information sources (Namy & Waxman, 2000), and informationally rich from coincidental co-occurrences as infants (Aslin, Saffran, & Newport, 1998; Newport & Aslin, 2004). How infants accomplish these feats of learning remains a puzzle, and the questions about underlying mechanisms are debated in a variety of fields including computational modeling, linguistics, and cognitive development. What is proposed here is that executive function skills, including metacognition, may be inherently intertwined with core processes, existing implicitly at very early ages and only emerging explicitly when children are much older. Thus infants can accomplish strategic learning by influencing control over processes like memory encoding through such cognitive behaviors as sustaining attentional focus. These behaviors are influenced by implicit access to internal states of knowledge, with the goal of most efficiently maximizing learning while avoiding redundancy. This implicit monitoring and control of core processes reflects procedural metacognition. Attribution of metacognition in this way, therefore, does not imply a complex system with two distinct cognitive mechanisms, one to perform a core function and another to evaluate and monitor. What is proposed here is that metacognition may be implicit, and occurs as an integral part of the cognitive process itself. For example, metamemory may be a resultant process of memory, such that during the retrieval process some items are marked as ‘more certain’ and others as ‘less certain’ either by familiarity, a sense of recognition, a threshold of recall strength, or other factor. If, indeed, a feeling of knowing is subserved by a simple mechanism integrated into the memory process itself, we might begin to understand how very young children appear well able to capitalize on information in memory to learn rapidly and efficiently, without demonstrating explicit awareness of their states of knowledge. Metacognition in Children In general many researchers believe that preschoolers do not have very sophisticated metacognition skills. Young children are not credited with strategic responding based on self-assessments until late preschool at the earliest, despite