Soto David, Lallier Marie, Desender Kobe, Elosegi Patxi
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 69, 2nd Floor 20009, San Sebastian, Spain.
Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Jun 24. doi: 10.3758/s13423-025-02720-7.
Metacognition allows us to monitor our own mental processes and the quality of our decisions in order to promote adaptive behavior and learning across different domains. Despite its potential, the role of metacognition in children - who often exhibit confidence biases that hinder learning - has yet to be systematically evaluated. This study aimed to improve confidence judgments in 7-year-old children by means of performance feedback. Two groups of children performed a multi-letter array recognition task: one group received feedback during the task whereas the other group did not (N = 24 each, 832 trials per participant). Both groups of participants were matched on their reading performance and non-verbal IQ. Surprisingly, feedback led to more liberal detection criteria in the letter task, faster choice latencies, and increased confidence biases. Simulations from a drift-diffusion model showed that the confidence increase in the feedback group was best explained by a decrease in response latencies, originating from a reduction in non-decision time. Thus, providing children with performance feedback may speed up their responses, which in turn boosts their feeling of confidence. This study underscores the complexity of using performance feedback to enhance metacognitive monitoring in children. We highlight the need for nuanced protocols to train metacognition that bypass the influence of children's inherent confidence biases and discuss potential research directions in this regard.
元认知使我们能够监控自己的心理过程和决策质量，以促进在不同领域的适应性行为和学习。尽管元认知具有潜力，但其在儿童中的作用——儿童常常表现出阻碍学习的信心偏差——尚未得到系统评估。本研究旨在通过表现反馈来改善7岁儿童的信心判断。两组儿童进行了多字母阵列识别任务：一组在任务过程中接受反馈，而另一组不接受反馈（每组N = 24人，每位参与者进行832次试验）。两组参与者在阅读表现和非言语智商方面相互匹配。令人惊讶的是，反馈导致在字母任务中采用更宽松的检测标准、更快的选择潜伏期以及信心偏差增加。来自漂移扩散模型的模拟表明，反馈组中信心的增加最好用反应潜伏期的缩短来解释，这源于非决策时间的减少。因此，向儿童提供表现反馈可能会加快他们的反应速度，进而增强他们的信心感。这项研究强调了利用表现反馈来增强儿童元认知监控的复杂性。我们强调需要有细微差别的方案来训练元认知，以绕过儿童固有信心偏差的影响，并讨论这方面潜在的研究方向。
