1. This research was funded by a small grant from the EPS society.
Thinking about thinking about thinking: Investigating the developmental link between meta-cognition, mind-reading and self-control Mariel Symeonidou1, Martin Doherty2, and Josephine Ross3 1University of Dundee, 2University of East Anglia -
INTRODUCTION
Metacognition, was once thought to not develop until after the age of five (Balcomb and Gerken, 2008). However, metacognition studies have traditionally relied on linguistically and conceptually complex answers.
Lyons and Ghetti (2011; 2013) utilised a non verbal task to assess certainty monitoring. They found that children as young as 3.5 years old could monitor the accuracy of their perceptual discriminations, as they were more likely to report that they were certain about accurate than inaccurate answers.
These new findings suggest that metacognition may onset at around the same time as self-control and theory of mind (ToM). Understanding the link between these skills is important as it could help clarify the mechanisms underlying social cognition.
From a theoretical perspective, it is possible that the ability to mind read relies on metacognition, as you would first need meta-level access to your own mental states before being able to project and understand another person’s perspective. This hypothesis is known as Simulation theory (Koriat & Ackerman, 2010). A large body of research links the development of ToM and self control (Feurer, Sassu, Cimeli and Roebers, 2015) and one explanation for this relationship is that self-control may be required for suppression of the first person perspective when thinking about other minds.
If this is the case it is expected that children will show introspection and self-control abilities before they start showing mind reading abilities.
There have been a handful of previous studies to draw longitudinal links between the development of mind-reading and self-control in early childhood and meta-cognition in later childhood (Lockl & Schneider, 2007), however none have tested the links between meta-cognition and mind-reading at the age of onset.
Lyons and Ghetti (2011) certainty score: sure and correct responses minus sure and incorrect responses.
SELF OTHER
However, when controlling for self-control we found that the relationship between ToM and certainty monitoring disappears.
These results imply that it is self-control that mediates the relationship between certainty monitoring and ToM ability. Our cross-sectional results imply that although metacognition and ToM are related, they are only related through the medium of self-control.
To explore developmental progression in these skills we considered pass rates for each of the tasks based on above chance performance.
The overall distribution indicated children were likely to develop certainty monitoring before they can advance to self-control and mind reading ability and this was confirmed with Cochran’s q analysis (χ2(2) = 34.15, p < .0005) and pairwise McNemar tests (shown above).
RESULTS
There was a close association between the metacognition, theory of mind and self-control tests. These skills also correlated with verbal mental age as obtained from British Picture Vocabulary Scores (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, & Whetton, 1982), but the relationships remained when this was controlled for.
In order to further examine whether ToM and self-control are independently related to ncertainty monitoring, we also ran partial correlations.
When controlling for ToM skills, the relationship between metacognition and self-control remained significant.
DISCUSSION
It appears that metacognition may be necessary for the development of self-control and then these two skill sets combined are a prerequisite for ToM.
This fits with the ideas presented in Simulation theory, in order to understand someone else's perspective we may first need to be able to reflect on our own mental states at a basic level (as indicated by certainty monitoring), and then step out of the first person perspective (requiring self-control) in order to reason flexibly about our own and other’s thoughts.
These cross-sectional results are part of a wider longitudinal project designed to explore the developmental relationship between self-control, meta-cognition and mind-reading.
METHOD
72 typically developing 3 and 4-year olds completed an adaptation of Lyons and Ghetti’s (2011; 2013) certainty monitoring task to measure their metacognitive ability.
Mind-reading ability was measured using a modified version of Wellman and Liu’s (2004) theory of mind battery.
Self-control was measured using Gerstadt, Hong and Diamond’s (1994) Night/Day Stroop task.
References
Balcombe, F., Gerken, L. (2008). Three-Year-Old Children Can Access Their Own Memory To Guide Responses On A Visual Matching Task, Developmental Science, vol 11(5),
Dunn, L. M., Dunn, L. M., Whetton, C. (1982). British Picture Vocabulary Scale. Windsor, England: NFER-Nelson
Feurer, E., Sassu, R., Cimeli, P., Roebers, C. (2015). Development of Meta-Representations: Procedural Metacognition and the Relationship to Theory of Mind, Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology, vol 5(1), 6-18
Koriat, A., Ackerman, R. (2010). Metacognition And Mindreading: Judgments Of Learning For Self And Other During Self-Paced Study, Consciousness and Cognition, vol 19, 251–264
Lockl, K., Schneider, W. (2007). Knowledge About The Mind: Links Between Theory Of Mind And Later Metamemory, Child Development, vol 78 (1),
Lyons, K., Ghetti, S. (2011). The Development of Uncertainty Monitoring in Early Childhood. Child Development., vol 82(2),
Lyons, K., Ghetti, S. (2013). I Don't Want to Pick! Introspection on Uncertainty Supports Early Strategic Behaviour, Child Development, vol 84(2),
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was funded by a small grant from the EPS society.