Does Monitoring Underlie the Association Between Executive Functions and Metacognition?

• In Event: Exploring the Association Between Executive Functions and Metacognition in Children: Empirical Work From Three Countries

Abstract

Metacognition (MC) and executive functions (EF) have traditionally been investigated separately although these two constructs share commonalities. Despite recent theoretical attempts to bring them together under a unifying framework (e.g. Roebers, 2017), especially on the monitoring aspect, there is still very limited empirical evidence. Studies have shown, using average accuracy and/or RT measures of EF, that 4-6 year-old children’s EF is associated with their latency of monitoring judgments, but not with the explicit monitoring judgments (Kälin & Roebers, 2020). Yet, particularly the monitoring aspect in EF is best captured by trial-by-trial measures such as post-error slowing (PES). Hence, we aim to explore the associations between not only the traditional accuracy and RT measures of EF, on the one side, but also post-error slowing in EF, on the other side, and metacognitive monitoring judgments. In this regard, we will present pre-registered secondary data analyses (currently underway) on pretest data of two training studies with kindergarten – 5-6 year olds (N = 173) – and 1st grade students – 6-7 year olds (N = 225) – to examine whether accuracy, RT or PES in a classical EF task (Hearts & Flowers; Diamond et al., 2007) is associated with monitoring judgments or the latency of monitoring judgments in a paired-associates recognition memory task (Destan et al., 2014). Further, we will explore the developmental progression of this link between EF and MC by comparing the presence and/or strength of the association in our kindergarten and 1st grader sample. The main objective is to shed more light onto the hypothesis that EF and MC may be unified on the monitoring aspect. Preliminary descriptive statistics show that the accuracy in EF is higher (88% vs. 85%, t = 2.50, p = .013) and RT is faster (845 ms vs. 922 ms, t = , -2.29, p = .023) in the 1st grade compared to the kindergarten children as would be expected, indicating that the measures are reliably comparable between the two samples.

Authors

• Ebru Ger, Universität Bern
  Presenting Author

• Florian Jonas Buehler, Universität Bern

• Claudia M. Roebers, University of Bern