Dutemple Elizabeth, Hakimi Hanifa, Poulin-Dubois Diane
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec H4B 1R6, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec H4B 1R6, Canada.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Mar;227:105572. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105572. Epub 2022 Nov 10.
Young children are often dependent on learning from others and to this effect develop heuristics to help distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources. Where younger children rely heavily on social cues such as familiarity with a source to make this distinction, older children tend to rely more on an informant's competence. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that help children to select the best informant; however, some evidence points toward mechanisms such as metacognition (thinking about thinking) and theory of mind (thinking about other's thoughts) being involved. The goals of the current study were to (a) explore how the monitoring and control components of metacognition may predict selective social learning in preschoolers and (b) attempt to replicate a reported link between selective social learning and theory of mind. In Experiment 1, no relationship was observed across the measures. In Experiment 2, only selective social learning and belief reasoning were found to be related as well as when both experiments' samples were combined. No links between selective social learning and metacognition were observed in the two experiments. These results suggest that theory of mind is a stronger correlate of selective learning than metacognition in young children. The implications regarding the kind of tasks used to measure metacognition are discussed.
幼儿通常依赖向他人学习，因此会发展出一些启发式方法，以帮助区分可靠来源和不可靠来源。年幼儿童在很大程度上依赖社会线索，比如对来源的熟悉程度来做出这种区分，而年长儿童则倾向于更多地依赖信息提供者的能力。关于帮助儿童选择最佳信息提供者的认知机制，我们所知甚少；然而，一些证据表明元认知（思考思维）和心理理论（思考他人的想法）等机制与之有关。本研究的目的是：（a）探讨元认知的监测和控制成分如何预测学龄前儿童的选择性社会学习；（b）尝试复制所报道的选择性社会学习与心理理论之间的联系。在实验1中，各项测量指标之间未观察到相关性。在实验2中，仅发现选择性社会学习与信念推理之间存在关联，以及在将两个实验的样本合并时也是如此。在这两个实验中，未观察到选择性社会学习与元认知之间的联系。这些结果表明，在幼儿中，心理理论比元认知与选择性学习的相关性更强。文中还讨论了关于用于测量元认知的任务类型的相关影响。
