Does Implicit Metacognition Provide a Tool for Self-Guided Learning in Preschool Children?

Many core cognitive processes, such as associative learning, are thought to appear early in infancy and develop rapidly throughout childhood, while more complex processes such as metacognition are thought to appear significantly later. However, there is an apparent paradox in that the rapid growth in cognitive development cannot be explained by passive learning mechanisms only, yet for children to actively guide their own learning, they must be at least somewhat self-referential. In the experiments reported here, metacognition was assessed using non-verbal tasks originally developed for non-human animals. Children aged 3.5 were able to demonstrate metacognition by strategically responding on a task in which they had to access their knowledge states. In addition, results indicate that children whose metacognitive assessments more closely matched their actual memory performance also showed superior overall learning compared to children whose metacognitive assessments were less accurate, suggesting that metamemory skill is correlated with memory itself. The results imply that metacognition may be intrinsically related to core cognitive processes and implicitly emergent in children as the processes themselves emerge, providing an explanation for how they are able to guide learning, even as infants.