Developmental Associations between Metamemory Subcomponents: Implications for Self-Awareness

• In Event: Metacognition

Abstract

Self-awareness is thought to play an important role in mental health but its development beyond infancy remains poorly understood. Metamemory, introspective knowledge of one’s memory (i.e., knowing you know or don’t know), is a component of self-awareness that can be assessed with facial recognition paradigms. In developmental studies, confidence judgments are often higher and response latencies faster for correct compared to incorrect trials (Ghetti et al., 2013). However, research has also indicated that children are overconfident in their memories compared to adolescents and adults (Roebers, 2002; Brewer & Day, 2005), suggesting developmental improvements in metamemory are taking place during this time. Additionally, scholars have argued that response latency serves as a mnemonic cue for subjective confidence (Kelly & Lindsey, 1993), but the relations between different components of metamemory is not well understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of two components of metamemory in a large sample ranging in age. Method: 181 individuals completed a facial memory task (35 children 6-12 years, 53 teenagers 13-15 years, 55 teenagers 16-18 years, 38 adults 19-24 years). In the encoding phase, 16 b/w images of faces were sequentially shown. During recall, participants were shown 32 faces (16 new) and indicated whether each face was new or old. Subsequently, participants indicated how confident they were in their response using a 5-point scale. First, paired-samples Wilcoxon tests were conducted to assess whether confidence and recall time significantly differ as a function of accuracy across age groups. Subsequently, correlations between age, confidence, and recall time (for correct and incorrect trials) were examined. Finally, latent change score models were used to estimate the difference in recall time and confidence as a function of accuracy and their associations with one another across age groups. Results: Across all four age groups, confidence is significantly greater and recall time significantly faster for correct than incorrect trials (see Figures 1a and 1b). However, children are significantly more confident on incorrect trials and take significantly longer to respond on correct trials than other age groups. As displayed in Table 1, age is significantly negatively correlated with recall time for correct (but not incorrect) trials and with confidence on incorrect (but not correct) trials. For teenagers and adults (but not children), responding faster on correct than incorrect trials is significantly associated with being more confident on correct than incorrect trials. Conclusion: With age, youth are faster to realize when they do or do not recognize a face and demonstrate greater awareness of uncertainty, suggesting developmental improvements in self-awareness are taking place in late childhood/early adolescence. Although children responded faster and were more confident on correct than incorrect trials on average, these tendencies were not necessarily observed simultaneously in the same children; by the early teenage years, however, they were. Findings are consistent with previous research (Koriat & Ackerman, 2010) in suggesting that response latency may serve as a cue for subjective certainty by adolescence.

Authors

• Margaret Whedon, Rutgers University - New Brunswick
  Presenting Author

• Michael Lewis, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School