Reported and automatic monitoring in cognitive control: Are children aware of their cognitive control abilities?

• In Event: Similarities and differences of metacognitive monitoring development in the context of cognitive control and memory

Abstract

Being able to reflect on one’s own performance is an important determinant of task success. In the field of metacognition, such metacognitive monitoring processes have been primarily studied via monitoring judgments provided by participants. Studies with school-aged children have observed that while children tend to overestimate their abilities, this overestimation reduces with age. Accurate metacognitive monitoring may be especially important in challenging contexts, such as those requiring the resolution of cognitive conflict. In so-called conflict tasks (e.g., the Stroop task), participants must attend to relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information. When the relevant and irrelevant information prompt different responses (i.e. in incongruent trials), cognitive control is required to respond correctly. Many theories of cognitive control assume the existence of a conflict monitoring mechanism which detects conflicts and alerts the system to upregulate the relevant and downregulate the irrelevant information (Botvinick et al. 2001). Evidence for this comes from the observation that conflict processing is affected by previously experienced conflict. That is, the congruency effect (difference in performance between congruent and incongruent trials) is reduced following conflict trials. Indeed, such conflict adaptation effects have been attributed to the coordination of two types of control processes – reactive (elicited in response to experienced conflict) and proactive (active in preparation for anticipated conflict; Braver, 2012) – and observed in children as young as 5 years (Ambrosi et al. 2016). However, it remains unknown whether the rather unconscious, automatic conflict monitoring thought to occur in conflict tasks is related to the conscious, reportable monitoring that are elicited in metacognitive studies. In this study, we aimed to directly investigate this link. Further, we investigate whether the relationship between the two types of monitoring changes across development.

Two groups of children (aged 6 and 8 years) completed a metacognitive version of the animal Stroop task (Bryce et al., 2011). After responding to each trial, participants gave a metacognitive judgment of their reaction time (RT). The relative monitoring accuracy of each child’s metacognitive judgments was calculated as the correlation between objective RTs and estimated RTs. Each child’s conflict adaptation effect was calculated as the difference between the congruency effect when the previous trial was congruent, and the congruency effect when the previous trial was incongruent. A conflict adaptation effect would support the existence of an automatic monitoring mechanism. We hypothesised that a) older children’s monitoring judgments would be more accurate than younger children’s, b) the accuracy of monitoring judgments would correlate with the size of the conflict adaptation effect. We had no expectations regarding how the relationship between reported and automatic monitoring would change with age.

Preliminary results indicate that relative monitoring accuracy is rather high (r=.41, p<.001) but does not change with age (t(56)=-1.43, p=.160). The conflict adaptation effect was positively correlated with monitoring accuracy in the younger children, but not the older children. This indicates that young children who were more affected by previously experienced conflict also made more accurate monitoring judgments. Possible reasons for this developmental pattern will be discussed.

Authors

• Donna Bryce, University of Tübingen
  Presenting Author

• Janina Eberhart, University of Tübingen