In contrast to past findings, researchers from the University of California, Davis conducted a new study that reveals preschool children aged between three and five years old are capable of conducting independent mental tasks.
The study comprised of 81 preschool children who were asked to view a series of drawings of items, with half of the images being presented once and the other half being shown twice. The children were then presented two images at once: one they had previously seen and another they hadn't seen. They were asked to identify which image they saw earlier. With this exercise, the researchers sought to examine the preschoolers' metacognition - the awareness and understand of one's own thought processes - of their memories.
"Previously, developmental researchers assumed that preschoolers did not introspect much on their mental states, and were not able to reflect on their own uncertainty when problem solving," said psychological scientist and lead author Emily Hembacher of the University of California, Davis, in this Association for Psychological Science news release. "This is partly because young children are not usually able to tell us much about their own mental processes due to verbal limitations."
After the preschoolers made the choice on which image they had seen earlier, the children rated how confident they were that they had made the correct choice and then sorted their answers into two boxes: one box was for responses confident about their choice and the other box was for responses that were unsure of their choice and thought they might be mistaken. The participants who put their responses in the first box wanted the researchers to see the results, but those who put theirs in the other box did not want the researchers to see.
The results showed the four- and five-year-olds were more confident in their correct memory responses than their incorrect ones, more confident about images they had seen twice, and based on their confidence level, were more likely to decide whether they wanted the researchers to view their response. The three-year-olds didn't display the same high levels of metacognition, but they reported having higher confidence levels compared to those who did not score as well.
Among the findings with the four- and five-year-olds, the fact that they were confident about images they had seen twice suggested good metacognitive ability because they were able to distinguish between stronger and weaker images. Additionally, choosing one of the boxes to place their response displayed they reflect on their own knowledge.
The study, "Don't Look at My Answer: Subjective Uncertainty Underlies Preschoolers' Exclusion of Their Least Accurate Memories," was published in the journal Psychological Science on July 11.
