The Developmental Trajectories of Implicit and Explicit Metacognitive Monitoring and Control in Cued Recall

Adults are adept at metacognitively monitoring their memory accuracy explicitly and implicitly, as well as at using metacognitive control processes to maintain high memory accuracy, but the development of monitoring and control is less understood. We administered an episodic cued recall task with children aged five to 11 years (N = 106). Participants watched two video clips of everyday episodic events before answering cued recall memory questions. For each memory question, participants provided a confidence rating (explicit monitoring), sorted their answer into show/hide boxes (control), and chose to volunteer/withhold their response (control). Multiple behavioural gestures of cognitive effort (implicit monitoring; e.g., long pauses, looking to carer, non-word fillers) were recorded and later coded by blind raters. Children were less accurate and less able to assign confidence to reflect their memory accuracy when they were forced to generate a response after previously saying “I don’t know”. But on volunteered trials, explicit, implicit monitoring and control measures predicted memory accuracy. There were age-related improvements in explicit monitoring for predicting memory accuracy, but there were no age differences in implicit monitoring or control processes. Uncertainty gestures partially mediated the confidence-accuracy relationship, suggesting that gestures are possibly one of many cues which can help children to explicitly monitor their memory accuracy, in accordance with cue-utilisation theory. Our findings suggest that explicit and implicit monitoring have different developmental trajectories in cued recall and that children can be adaptive to control their memory accuracy to a similar extent from early- to mid-childhood.