Are Children Conservative, Liberal or Metacognitive? Preliminary Evidence for the Involvement of the Distinctiveness Heuristic in Decision Making

The present experiment investigates whether young children are able to reduce their false recognition rate after distinctive encoding by implementing a strategic metacognitive rule. Seventy-two children, aged 4, 6, and 9 years, studied two lists of unrelated items. One of these lists was visually displayed (picture condition) while the other was presented auditorily (word 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 results of the signal detection analyses were 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 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.