The effect of feedback on children’s metacognitive judgments: a heuristic account

In three experiments, we investigated whether the feedback effect on the accuracy of children’s metacognitive judgments results from an improvement in monitoring processes or the use of the Anchoring-and-Adjustment heuristic. Experiment 1 revealed that adding feedback increased the accuracy of young children’s (aged 4, 6, and 8 years) memory prediction. In Experiment 2, the influence of an external anchor on children’s metacognitive judgment was established. Finally, in Experiment 3, two memory tasks that differed in terms of difficulty were administered. Participants were randomly assigned to an anchoring (high/low/no anchor) and a feedback (feedback/no feedback) condition. Results demonstrated that children in the feedback condition adjusted their predictions toward the feedback, regardless of the task’s difficulty. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that external information provided by feedback is used as an anchor for judgment. This interpretation is strengthened by the correlation found between the two scores computed to assess participants’ susceptibility to anchoring and feedback effects, which indicates that children who are more sensitive to the anchoring effect are also more sensitive to the feedback effect.     

相似性判断和差异性判断的不对称性及其机制探索

本文阐述了相似性判断和差异性判断不对称性的相关研究。首先介绍了不对称性的发展及理论解释。其次,根据事件相关电位的研究结果,阐述了图-词信息的双编码模型对相似性判断的影响。接着分析和介绍了相似性判断的双编码过程及其时间进程。最后,作者提出有待深入研究的几个问题：（1）差异性策略在分类和推理中的应用;（2）相似性双编码过程的实证研究及其应用;（3）从发展认知神经科学的角度探讨不对称的认知神经机制。     

The influence of negligence, intention, and outcome on children’s moral judgments

Piaget (1932) and subsequent researchers have reported that young children’s moral judgments are based more on the outcomes of actions than on the agents’ intentions. The current study investigated whether negligence might also influence these judgments and explain children’s apparent focus on outcome. Children (3–8 years of age) and adults (N = 139) rated accidental actions in which the valences of intention, negligence, and outcome were varied systematically. Participants of all ages were influenced primarily by intention, and well-intentioned actions were also evaluated according to negligence and outcome. Only two young children based their judgments solely on outcome. It is suggested that previous studies have underestimated children’s use of intention because outcome and negligence have been confounded. Negative consequences are considered to be important because children assume that they are caused by negligence. The findings indicate that young children can show sophisticated understanding of the roles of intention and negligence in moral judgments.     

Stress at encoding,context at retrieval,and children’s narrative content

Research concerning the relations between stress and children’s memory has been primarily correlational and focused on memory volume and accuracy. In the current study, we experimentally manipulated 7- and 8-year-olds’ and 12- to 14-year-olds’ experienced stress during a to-be-remembered event to examine the effects of stress on the content of their memory. We further manipulated the degree of interviewer support at retrieval to determine whether it moderated the effects of stress at encoding on memory. Children’s age, gender, stress at encoding, and interviewer support all influenced the type of information included in their narrative reports. Most notably, across ages, children who experienced a more stressful event but were questioned in a supportive manner provided the largest ratio of terms representing internal states such as those about cognitions and emotions. Results suggest that how children process past events may be influenced by both the nature of the event itself and the context within which it is recalled.     

The roles of working memory and intervening task difficulty in determining the benefits of repetition

Memory is better when learning events are spaced, as compared with massed (i.e., the spacing effect). Recent theories posit that retrieval of an item’s earlier presentation contributes to the spacing effect, which suggests that individual differences in the ability to retrieve an earlier event may influence the benefit of spaced repetition. The present study examined (1) the difficulty of task demands between repetitions, which should modulate the ability to retrieve the earlier information, and (2) individual differences in working memory in a spaced repetition paradigm. Across two experiments, participants studied a word set twice, each separated by an interval where duration was held constant, and the difficulty of the intervening task was manipulated. After a short retention interval following the second presentation, participants recalled the word set. Those who scored high on working memory measures benefited more from repeated study than did those who scored lower on working memory measures, regardless of task difficulty. Critically, a crossover interaction was observed between working memory and intervening task difficulty: Individuals with low working memory scores benefited more when task difficulty was easy than when it was difficult, but individuals with high working memory scores produced the opposite effect. These results suggest that individual differences in working memory should be considered in optimizing the benefits of repetition learning.     

The development of children’s early memory skills

A multitask battery tapping nonverbal memory and language skills was used to assess 60 children at 18, 24, and 30 months of age. Analyses focused on the degree to which language, working memory, and deliberate memory skills were linked concurrently to children’s Elicited Imitation task performance and whether the patterns of association varied across the different ages. Language ability emerged as a predictor of immediate Elicited Imitation performance by 24 months of age and predicted delayed performance at each age. In addition to the contributions of language, children’s abilities to search for and retrieve toys in the deliberate memory task were associated with their immediate Elicited Imitation performance at each age. In addition to language, working memory was positively associated with aspects of both immediate and delayed performance at all ages. The extent to which it was possible to replicate and extend previous cross-sectional work in this longitudinal study is discussed.     

4岁儿童对他人记忆的评判与错误信念理解的关系

从观点采择的角度考察儿童对他人记忆的评判及其与错误信念理解的关系。与他人分享记忆时,个体需要同时处理自我与他人对过去的表征和看法;而要顺利完成错误信念任务,个体需要同时加工自我的真实信念与他人的错误信念。因此个体对他人记忆的评判能力可能会与其对错误信念的理解相关。40名4岁儿童完成一系列错误信念任务和评判他人记忆是否正确任务,情境包括视觉、意图解释和情绪解释。结果表明,控制年龄、语言和记忆能力等因素后,被试评判他人记忆的成绩仍然可以预测其对错误信念的理解。这些结果为幼儿在回忆叙述中谈及他人越多,其心理理论越好提供了进一步的证据和可能的解释     

Exemplar effects in categorization and multiple-cue judgment

Categorization and multiple-cue judgment are similar tasks, but the influential models in the two areas are different in terms of the computations, processes, and neural substrates that they imply. In categorization, exemplar memory is often emphasized, whereas multiple-cue judgment generally is interpreted in terms of integration of cues that have been abstracted in training. In 3 experiments the authors investigated whether these conclusions derive from genuine differences in the processes or are accidental to the different research methods. The results revealed large individual differences and a shift from exemplar memory to cue abstraction when the criterion is changed from a binary to a continuous variable, especially for a probabilistic criterion. People appear to switch between qualitatively distinct processes in the 2 tasks.     

Spontaneous focusing on numerosity as a domain-specific predictor of arithmetical skills

The aim of this 2 year longitudinal study was to explore whether children’s individual differences in spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) in kindergarten predict arithmetical and reading skills 2 years later in school. Moreover, we investigated whether the positive relationship between SFON and mathematical skills is explained by children’s individual differences in spontaneous focusing on a non-numerical aspect. The participants were 139 Finnish-speaking children. The results show that SFON tendency in kindergarten is a significant domain-specific predictor of arithmetical skills, but not reading skills, assessed at the end of Grade 2. In addition, the relationship between SFON and number sequence skills in kindergarten is not explained by children’s individual differences in their focusing on a non-numerical aspect that is, spatial locations.     

Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal force and intention in moral judgment

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent’s intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively “direct” or “personal”. Here we integrate these two classes of findings. Two experiments examine a novel personalness/directness factor that we call personal force, present when the force that directly impacts the victim is generated by the agent’s muscles (e.g., in pushing). Experiments 1a and b demonstrate the influence of personal force on moral judgment, distinguishing it from physical contact and spatial proximity. Experiments 2a and b demonstrate an interaction between personal force and intention, whereby the effect of personal force depends entirely on intention. These studies also introduce a method for controlling for people’s real-world expectations in decisions involving potentially unrealistic hypothetical dilemmas.     

Individual differences in category learning: sometimes less working memory capacity is better than more

We examined whether individual differences in working memory influence the facility with which individuals learn new categories. Participants learned two different types of category structures: rule-based and information-integration. Successful learning of the former category structure is thought to be based on explicit hypothesis testing that relies heavily on working memory. Successful learning of the latter category structure is believed to be driven by procedural learning processes that operate largely outside of conscious control. Consistent with a widespread literature touting the positive benefits of working memory and attentional control, the higher one’s working memory, the fewer trials one took to learn rule-based categories. The opposite occurred for information-integration categories - the lower one’s working memory, the fewer trials one took to learn this category structure. Thus, the positive relation commonly seen between individual differences in working memory and performance can not only be absent, but reversed. As such, a comprehensive understanding of skill learning - and category learning in particular - requires considering the demands of the tasks being performed and the cognitive abilities of the performer.     

Event memory and suggestibility in abused and neglected children: trauma-related psychopathology and cognitive functioning

This study examined event memory and suggestibility in 3- to 16-year-olds involved in forensic investigations of child maltreatment. A total of 322 children were interviewed about a play activity with an unfamiliar adult. Comprehensive measures of individual differences in trauma-related psychopathology and cognitive functioning were administered. Sexually and/or physically abused children obtained higher dissociation scores than neglected children, and sexually abused children were more likely to obtain a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder than physically abused children, neglected children, and children with no substantiated abuse histories. Overall, older children and children with better cognitive functioning produced more correct information and fewer memory errors. Abuse status per se did not significantly predict children’s memory or suggestibility whether considered alone or in interaction with age. However, among highly dissociative children, more trauma symptoms were associated with greater inaccuracy, whereas trauma symptoms were not associated with increased error for children who were lower in dissociative tendencies. Implications of the findings for understanding eyewitness memory in maltreated children are discussed.     

Longitudinal Development of Memory for Temporal Order in Early to Middle Childhood

Abstract

Existing studies examining the development of temporal order memory show that although young children perform above chance on some tasks assessing temporal order memory, there are significant age-related differences across childhood. Yet, the trajectory of children’s ability to retrieve temporal order remains unclear as existing conclusions are drawn from cross-sectional studies. The present study utilized an accelerated longitudinal design in order to characterize the developmental trajectory of temporal order memory in a sample of 200 healthy 4- to 8-year-old children. Specifically, two tasks commonly used in the literature were tested longitudinally: a primacy judgment task and an ordering task. Results revealed that, even after controlling for differences in IQ, linearly increasing trajectories characterized age-related change in performance for both tasks; however, change appeared greater for the temporal ordering task. Further, performance on the two tasks was positively related, suggesting shared underlying mechanisms. These findings provide a more thorough understanding of temporal order memory in early to middle childhood by characterizing the developmental trajectories of two commonly used tasks and have important implications for our understanding of children’s developing memory more broadly.     

Children’s causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers

Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector,” a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine’s activation that required them to use indirect evidence to make causal inferences. Critically, associative models either made no predictions, or made incorrect predictions about these inferences. In general, children were able to make these inferences, but some developmental differences between 3- and 4-year-olds were found. We suggest that children’s causal inferences are not based on recognizing associations, but rather that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. Experiment 3 explicitly tests a prediction of this account. Children were asked to make an inference about ambiguous data based on the base rate of certain events occurring. Four-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds were able to make this inference.     

Differences in self-talk frequency as a function of age, only-child, and imaginary childhood companion status

In three studies, we examined differences in the frequency with which people report talking to themselves. Using a standardized measure of self-talk frequency, the Self-Talk Scale (Brinthaupt, Hein, & Kramer, 2009), we collected information about college student participants’ age, sex, and family configuration (i.e., only or sibling child), and whether they had an imaginary companion in childhood. In Study 1, significant differences in self-talk were found between different age groupings. In Study 2, children without siblings reported more self-talk than children with siblings. Finally, in Study 3, respondents who reported having an imaginary companion in childhood also reported significantly more self-talk than those who did not have an imaginary childhood companion. We discuss the self-regulatory and developmental implications of these results.     

Intentions vs. resemblance: Understanding pictures in typical development and autism

Research has debated whether children reflect on artists’ intentions when comprehending pictures, or instead derive meaning entirely from resemblance. We explore these hypotheses by comparing how typically developing toddlers and low-functioning children with autism (a population impaired in intentional reasoning) interpret abstract pictures. In Experiment 1, both groups mapped familiar object names onto abstract pictures, however, they related the same representations to different 3-D referents. Toddlers linked abstract pictures with intended referents they did not resemble, while children with autism mapped picture-referent relations based on resemblance. Experiment 2 showed that toddlers do not rely upon linguistic cues to determine intended referential relations. Experiment 3 confirmed that the responding of children with autism was not due to perseveration or associative word learning, and also provided independent evidence of their intention-reading difficulties. We argue that typically developing children derive meaning from the social-communicative intentions underlying pictures when resemblance is an inadequate cue to meaning. By contrast, children with autism do not reflect on artists’ intentions and simply relate pictures to whatever they happen to resemble.     

不同目击者对儿童道德情绪判断与归因的影响

本研究考察不同权威目击者对儿童道德情绪判断与归因的影响。实验以90个7~8岁儿童为被试,采用3(行为情境)×3(目击权威类型)的组间设计,考察了不同权威目击者条件下儿童对不同行为者的道德情绪判断和归因。结果发现,目击权威的类型对儿童道德情绪判断与归因的影响在不同的行为情境条件下是不同的。成人权威目击条件下,儿童对亲社会行为者的道德情绪判断分数最高,即更多判断他们会感到高兴,对损人者的道德情绪判断分数最低,即更多判断他们会感到不高兴。而同龄权威和非权威目击条件下儿童对不同行为者的情绪判断分数不存在显著差异。不同权威目击条件下儿童对行为者的情绪归因存在显著差异,奖惩定向更多出现在成人权威目击条件。研究显示,成人权威对儿童道德情绪的培养具有重要意义,能够显著影响儿童的道德情绪判断与归因。     

The role of verbal and nonverbal memory in the Family Pictures Subtest: Data from children with specific language impairment

This study examined the contribution of verbal and visual memory to performance on the Family Pictures subtest of the Children’s Memory Scale. This subtest purports to assess declarative memory functioning in the visual/nonverbal domain. A total of 115 nine-year-old children participated in this study. Fifty-eight had specific language impairment (SLI), whilst the remaining 57 were typically developing (TD), with no history of language difficulties. Results showed that the children with SLI, who had intact declarative memory for visual but not verbal information, obtained significantly lower scores on the Family Pictures subtest when compared to the TD group. Regression analyses revealed that across the entire sample, individual differences on the Family Pictures subtest was best predicted by a measure of verbal working memory. These results question whether the Family Pictures subtest can be considered a measure of visual memory in pediatric populations. These results have implications for the interpretation of scores on this subtest regarding the nature of the types of neurocognitive difficulties children may exhibit.     

Three-year-olds Remember a Novel Event from 20 Months: Evidence for Long-term Memory in Children?

Abstract

Thirty-seven 3-year-old children, who had learned a 9-action event sequence (“making Play-Doh spaghetti”) when they were 20 months old, returned to the lab to determine whether they would be able to verbally and/or behaviourally recall the event after a 12- to 22-month delay. Children originally participated in the event either one or three times and experienced different parts of the event either at three distinct locations (spatial condition) or at a single location (nonspatial condition). Results show very little evidence of long-term memory for the event after one to two years. Returning children did not verbally recall the event, and they did not perform more actions or sequence the event more accurately than controls, with the exception of the older experimental children who had a tendency to sequence the event more accurately than same-aged controls. Although the results indicate that young children's memory for novel events is not very enduring, there were individual differences in children's ability to remember the event. These differences are discussed in terms of potential differences in cognitive abilities and changing knowledge about retrieval strategies or memory.