Involvement of the Distinctiveness Heuristic in Children's Decision Making

Over the past decades, researchers studying adult metacognition have placed a heavy emphasis on how expectations and naïve theories about memory functioning can improve memory accuracy through the implementation of some metacognitive rules. By contrasts, however, research on metacognition in children has only recently started to pay attention to the influence of these heuristic-based judgments on decision making. Generally, the results of these studies indicate that memory decisions are already based on some heuristics by the ages of 7-8 years. Thus far, the question of whether younger children can do the same has widely gone unexamined.
The present experiment investigates whether young children are able to reduce their false recognitions rate after distinctive encoding through the implementation of a strategic metacognitive rule. Specifically, we examine the use of a retrieval strategy called the distinctiveness heuristic whereby people infer that an event has not occurred when they cannot remember expected memorial information about it. Seventy-two children, aged 4, 6, and 9 years, studied two lists of unrelated items. One of these lists was visually displayed (picture/dictinctive condition) while the other was presented auditorily (word/no-distinctive condition). After each study phase, participants completed recognition tests. Finally, they answered questions about their explicit knowledge of the distinctive-encoding effect. The results revealed that even the youngest children in our sample showed a smaller proportion of intrusions in the picture condition than in the word condition. Furthermore, the findings of the signal detection analyses are consistent with the hypothesis that the lower rate of false recognitions after picture encoding results from the implementation of a conservative response criterion based on the participants’ metacognitive expectations (distinctiveness heuristic). Moreover, the absence of correlation between children’s explicit knowledge of the distinctiveness rule and their effective use of this metacognitive heuristic seems to indicate that its involvement in memory decisions could be mediated by implicit mechanisms.