Development of early metacognition: A longitudinal study

Metacognition was long assumed to emerge relatively late in children development. Recent studies, however, have suggested that even preverbal infants can access their internal states, albeit not explicitly. The aim of the present study was to longitudinally document the evolution of both implicit and explicit metacognitive abilities in children aged from 2.5 to 3.5 years. Sixty-seven children were presented with a forced-choice recognition test at age 2.5 (T0) and at 1-year follow-up (T1). During this test, children were asked to provide a retrospective confidence judgment following each memory decision (explicit judgment) and had also the opportunity to ask for a cue to help them to decide between the two options (implicit judgment). Results revealed that 2.5-year-old children performed at chance for both the explicit and the implicit measure of metacognition, indicating their inability to discriminate between correct and incorrect memory responses. While our longitudinal data revealed a significant improvement in both explicit and implicit metacognition between T0 and T1, only the accuracy of participants’ implicit judgment was higher than chance at age 3.5. Regression analyses revealed that the accuracy of children implicit judgment at T0 uniquely predicted the accuracy of their implicit judgment one year later while the accuracy of children’s explicit judgment at T0 only predicted explicit metacognition at T1. Our data support an early use of implicit metacognition for memory – around the age of 3.5 – while confirming the later development of explicit metacognition.