Geurten Marie, Lemaire Patrick
Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Unit, University of Liège, Belgium; Aix-Marseille University & CNRS, Marseille, France.
Aix-Marseille University & CNRS, Marseille, France; Institut Universitaire de France.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2017 Oct;180:105-116. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.09.005. Epub 2017 Sep 20.
We examined the role of metacognitive monitoring in strategic behavior during arithmetic problem solving, a process that is expected to shed light on age-related differences in strategy selection. Young and older adults accomplished better strategy-judgment, better strategy-selection, and strategy-execution tasks. Data showed that participants made better strategy judgments when problems were problems with homogeneous unit digits (i.e., problems with both unit digits smaller or larger than 5; 31×62) relative to problems with heterogeneous unit digits (i.e., problems with one unit digit smaller or larger than 5; 31×67) and when the better strategy was cued on rounding-up problems (e.g., 68×23) compared to rounding-down problems (e.g., 36×53). Results also indicated higher rates of better strategy judgment in young than in older adults. These aging effects differed across problem types. Older adults made more accurate judgments on rounding-up problems than on rounding-down problems when the cued strategy was rounding-up, while young adults did not show such problem-related differences. Moreover, strategy selection correlated with strategy judgment, and even more so in older adults than in young adults. To discuss the implications of these findings, we propose a theoretical framework of how strategy judgments occur in young and older adults and discuss how this framework enables to understand relationships between metacognitive monitoring and strategic behaviors when participants solve arithmetic problems.
我们研究了元认知监控在算术问题解决过程中的策略行为中的作用，这一过程有望揭示策略选择中与年龄相关的差异。年轻人和老年人在策略判断、策略选择和策略执行任务中表现更佳。数据显示，与单位数字不同质的问题（即一个单位数字大于5而另一个小于5的问题；31×67）相比，当问题是单位数字同质的问题（即两个单位数字都小于或大于5的问题；31×62）时，以及与向下取整问题（例如，36×53）相比，当更好的策略在向上取整问题（例如，68×23）中得到提示时，参与者能做出更好的策略判断。结果还表明，年轻人比老年人做出更好策略判断的比率更高。这些年龄效应在不同类型的问题中有所不同。当提示的策略是向上取整时，老年人在向上取整问题上的判断比在向下取整问题上更准确，而年轻人则没有表现出这种与问题相关的差异。此外，策略选择与策略判断相关，在老年人中比在年轻人中相关性更强。为了讨论这些发现的意义，我们提出了一个关于年轻人和老年人如何进行策略判断的理论框架，并讨论了该框架如何有助于理解参与者解决算术问题时元认知监控与策略行为之间的关系。
