The Neurocognitive Correlates of Young Children’s Uncertainty Monitoring: An ERP Study

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

Abstract

Children’s ability to engage in uncertainty monitoring (the ability to recognize and reflect upon subjective experiences of uncertainty when making decisions with insufficient evidence or after making mistakes) has long been held as an important part of metacognition and a driving force of broader aspects of cognitive development (Flavell, 1979; Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996). More recent research has revealed that uncertainty monitoring is present even during the preschool-years (Ghetti & Lyons, 2011; 2013) and is associated with young children’s learning and decisions (Ghetti & Lyons, 2013; Coughlin et al, 2014). Recent theoretical perspectives (Roebers, 2017) have also highlighted the shared developmental timelines and potential connections between the development of uncertainty monitoring and young children’s executive functions (EF). Whereas the neurocognitive correlates of executive functions are better understood (Downes et al, 2017), little is known about the neurocognitive correlates underlying the development of uncertainty monitoring.
Several studies on children’s executive functions have utilized electroencephalograms (EEG) to measure brain activity as children complete various EF tasks (Downes et al, 2017). When examining event-related potentials (ERP), previous studies have identified two ERP components related to children’s executive functions that may also support early uncertainty monitoring: the N2 and error-related negativity (ERN). The N2 emerges soon after the presentation of a test probe and is thought to reflect and the amount of cognitive conflict or the detection of a situation that might generate errors, e.g., a larger waveform is observed during high-conflict situations versus low-conflict situations (Espinet, et. al, 2012). Similarly, ERN is a negative deflection that is observed as an error is committed and is thought to represent an implicit performance monitoring signal (Meyer, et. al, 2014). Both the N2 and ERN increase in strength from childhood to adolescence but are measurable in preschool children (Downes et al, 2017).
The current study sought to measure both the N2 and ERN in relation to children’s subjective confidence ratings in a novel ERP task assessing young children’s uncertainty monitoring. Participants consisted of five- and six-year-old children (N = 25 out of planned 48, 68% female). During EEG acquisition, children completed a perceptual judgment task (Lyons & Ghetti, 2013) where they were asked to identify which of two degraded line drawings of commonly known object contained the target and then rate their confidence on a three-point scale (e.g., Very-Sure, Kind-of-Sure, Not-Sure).
Preliminary results (see Figure 1) suggest that children exhibit both a larger N2 and ERN when they rated their responses as Not-Sure compared to when they rated the responses as Very-Sure. Inferential statistics will be conducted when collection of the full sample is complete. A relation between these ERP components and children’s uncertainty monitoring would suggest that children’s subjective assessments of uncertainty rely on internal signals of conflict and error monitoring. These findings highlight the relation between uncertainty monitoring and executive function and provides the first empirical evidence using ERPs to measure the neural signals of uncertainty monitoring in children.

Authors

• Christopher Gonzales, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Lindsay Caroline Bowman, University of California - Davis

• Sonja Hunter, University of California - Davis

• Simona Ghetti, University of California - Davis