Cognitive and Educational Sciences Laboratory (CESLAb), Faculty of Education, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, 39042 Bressanone-Brixen, Italy; Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy.
Cognitive and Educational Sciences Laboratory (CESLAb), Faculty of Education, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, 39042 Bressanone-Brixen, Italy.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Apr;204:105065. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105065. Epub 2021 Jan 8.
Recently, event-based prospective memory (PM) performance of children has been shown to benefit from different encoding strategies such as imagining the execution of a future PM task (i.e., future thinking) and making performance predictions (i.e., metacognitive monitoring). This study aimed to investigate whether and how these two encoding strategies affect PM performance alone and in combination. For this purpose, 127 children aged 8-11 years were assigned to four encoding conditions: (a) standard, (b) performance predictions, (c) future thinking, and (d) future thinking + performance predictions. The ongoing task performance costs (i.e., attentional monitoring), working memory (WM) span, and metacognitive monitoring judgments, such as task difficulty expectations, performance postdictions, confidence judgments, and strategy use, were also evaluated among participants. The results show that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions considerably improved children's PM performance without incurring additional attentional monitoring costs. Moreover, whereas children generally tended to overestimate their PM performance, more realistic lower-performance predictions were related to higher PM scores for children in the combined condition. Finally, age, WM, and strategy use significantly predicted PM performance independent of the encoding condition. This study is the first to demonstrate that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions enhances children's PM performance compared with each encoding strategy alone. Moreover, this work is the first to show that by simply imagining the execution of a PM task, children's prediction accuracy can be improved, which is significantly related to the PM performance advantage.
最近，研究表明，儿童基于事件的前瞻性记忆（PM）表现可以通过不同的编码策略得到改善，例如想象未来 PM 任务的执行（即未来思维）和做出表现预测（即元认知监控）。本研究旨在调查这两种编码策略单独和结合使用时是否以及如何影响 PM 表现。为此，127 名 8-11 岁的儿童被分配到四个编码条件：（a）标准、（b）表现预测、（c）未来思维和（d）未来思维+表现预测。参与者还评估了正在进行的任务表现成本（即注意力监控）、工作记忆（WM）跨度以及元认知监控判断，如任务难度预期、表现后预测、信心判断和策略使用。结果表明，将未来思维指导与表现预测相结合，在不增加额外注意力监控成本的情况下，显著提高了儿童的 PM 表现。此外，尽管儿童普遍倾向于高估自己的 PM 表现，但在结合条件下，更现实的低表现预测与儿童更高的 PM 得分相关。最后，年龄、WM 和策略使用独立于编码条件显著预测 PM 表现。本研究首次证明，与单独使用每种编码策略相比，将未来思维指导与表现预测相结合可以提高儿童的 PM 表现。此外，本研究首次表明，通过简单地想象 PM 任务的执行，儿童的预测准确性可以提高，这与 PM 表现优势显著相关。
