“Should I use your hint?” How Children Integrate Hints into Their Memory Decisions

• In Event: 3-225 - Psychology Meets Education: How Children Gain from Self-regulated Learning

Integrative Statement

Introduction. Children often receive information from others (e.g., parents or siblings) when they attempt to remember. This information may be generally reliable, but not always accurate. Therefore, children must decide when they should rely on their own memory and when they should rely on a recommendation in order to maximize performance. Children’s ability to introspect on the accuracy of memory improves throughout middle childhood (Fandakova et al. 2017) suggesting that children’s ability to use external information only when needed should also improve with age.

In Experiment 1 24 five-year-olds, 24 seven-year olds, and 24 nine-year olds incidentally encoded a series of pictures followed by a recognition memory test. The majority of recognition trials were preceded by a hint suggesting that the upcoming test picture would likely be ‘old’ or ‘new’. The accuracy of the hints was 70%. Children were informed that the hints provided the accurate response most, but not all, of the time. Additionally, some trials did not have hints and served as baseline. Accuracy (d’) significantly improved under valid hints (M=2.01, SD=.70, p=.02) and declined under invalid hints (M=1.46, SD=.85, p<.001) relative to baseline (M=1.82, SD=.65). This effect did not interact with age, p=.79. Similar accuracy was observed during hints overall (including both valid and invalid trials) relative to baseline in all age groups (ps>.57). See Figure 1. Thus, all age groups were similarly sensitive to hints, but children’s overall memory performance did not increase from baseline to hint trials. However, baseline memory performance was above the accuracy level of the hint, limiting the improvements that could be observed. Additionally, actively asking for hints, as opposed to being provided with hints as in this experiment, might promote this selectivity because children have the opportunity to introspect on their memory before determining whether to seek help. To address these issues, in Experiment 2 children’s overall memory performance was lowered by encoding words instead of pictures. Additionally, during hint trials children were either always provided with hints or could actively select when they wanted to see hints.

Experiment 2 is projected to include 156 children (52 five-year-olds, 52 seven-year olds, 52 nine-year olds; Current N=81) and is analogous to Experiment 1 except that during test, we manipulated whether the hint is given or is given only when children ask for it.

Preliminary analyses restricted to 5-year-olds (N=43) show that compared to baseline, children were more accurate when they asked for hints (hint: M=1.45, SD=.51; baseline: M=1.26, SD=.65) and when they were given hints (hint: M=1.66, SD=.78; baseline: M=1.31, SD=.62), suggesting that even young children can benefit from hints when memory performance is lower than that of the recommendation. Interestingly, children were more confident in their accurate compared to inaccurate responses when children asked for hints (accurate M=1.60, SD=.36; inaccurate M=1.28, SD=.56) but not when they were provided with hints (accurate M=1.34, SD=.42; inaccurate M=1.33, SD=.45), suggesting that the hint-asking promotes metacognitive monitoring in young children. Additional analyses will examine age-related differences in this pattern of results.

Authors

• Diana Selmeczy, University of California, Davis
  Presenting Author

• Alireza Kazemi, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Simona Ghetti, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author