Explicit and implicit measures of metacognition in cued recall have a stable development between five to 11 years

Metacognition allows us to monitor and control our behaviour to help us to evaluate our memory performance. Adults are adept at monitoring their memory accuracy explicitly and implicitly, as well as using control processes but the development of monitoring and control is less understood. In this study we administered an episodic cued recall task with children from three age-groups: five- to six-year-olds (N = 35), seven- to eight-year-olds (N = 33) and nine- to 11-year-olds (N = 38). Participants watched two video clips of mundane episodic events (e.g. person making breakfast) before answering cued recall memory questions. On each trial, participants provided a confidence rating (explicit monitoring), sorted their answer into show/hide boxes (control) and chose to volunteer/withhold their response (control). Behavioural gestures (implicit monitoring) were recorded and later coded by blind raters. The findings showed that children have developed explicit and implicit monitoring (i.e. long pauses, non-word fillers, vowel length, high tone, head nods & looking to carer) and control to inform about their memory accuracy. In contrast to previous research, we found no age differences in explicit and implicit monitoring and control between five to 11 years. Moreover, uncertainty gestures partially mediated the confidence-accuracy relationship, which suggests that gestures are one of many cues which can help children to explicitly monitor their memory accuracy. We conclude that explicit and implicit forms of metacognition have a stable development from early- to mid-childhood and young children are not solely reliant on implicit monitoring as previously thought.