Poster #129 - Thinking about You Without Thinking About Me: Longitudinal Relationships Between Metacognition and Theory of Mind

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

There are many skills that a child must master before being able to thrive in a social and academic environment, such as metacognition and theory of mind. Metacognition is defined as cognitive processes that regulate other cognitive processes, also referred to as “thinking about thinking” (Flavell, 1979; Geurten & Willems, 2016; Schneider, 2008), whereas theory of mind (or mind-mindedness) is the ability to reflect upon other people’s thoughts, intentions, and emotions (Wellman, 2004).
Metacognition has been well studied in older children, however, little work has been done with young children, as it was initially believed that metacognition only developed in older children; however, implicit measures of metacognition have shown that even infants and toddlers can verbally and non-verbally express confidence in their knowledge, or lack thereof, using other means than traditional metacognitive language (e.g., persisting on an answer, asking for a clue; Goupil & Kouider, 2016; Geurten & Bastin, 2019). This has opened a brand-new avenue of study, allowing us to measure the earliest signs of metacognition in pre-school aged children, and giving us the opportunity to map the longitudinal development of metacognition both implicitly and explicitly. Theory of mind, on the other hand, has been studied extensively with many age groups but using a variety of lab-based tasks that are often limited in scope. The Children’s Social Understanding Scale (CSUS; Tahiroglu et al., 2014) is a parental report which seeks to broaden the constructs measured related to theory of mind to allow for a more ecologically valid measure of children’s abilities. No study has sought to link these socio-cognitive abilities using this scale.
Theory of mind and metacognition are theoretically believed to be related, where the ability to regulate our own thoughts develops from our ability to reflect upon other people’s thoughts, therefore out of the same ability to represent abstract concepts (Perner, 1991). The literature does not fully support this theoretical claim however, as some studies report concurrent links between theory of mind and metacognition, whereas others do not (see Baer et al., 2021; Flavell, 2000; Perner, 1991; Schneider & Lockl, 2006). The present study sought to explore both the concurrent and longitudinal relationships between these two socio-cognitive abilities using two different metacognitive tasks and a theory of mind questionnaire.
We measured metacognition at two time points (4 years and 6 years) using a visual discrimination task (Geurten & Bastin, 2019) during which the children could express how confident they were about their answers (explicit metacognition) and whether they needed help answering (implicit metacognition). We measured theory of mind using the CSUS. Early results from this ongoing study (N = 26) suggest that early implicit metacognition predicts both implicit and explicit metacognition at 6-year-old, however that theory of mind is unrelated to either form of metacognition. Theory of mind at 4 years was highly related to theory of mind two years later. Our final sample will consist of sixty-three children (discounting attrition). These data support the view that the two skills are entirely differentiated.

Authors

• Elizabeth Dutemple, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia University