Young Children Bet on Their Numerical Skills
Vy A. Vo, Rosa Li, Nate Kornell, Alexandre Pouget, Jessica F. Cantlon
Psychological Science · 2014 · Volume 25 · Issue 9
Abstract
Metacognition, the ability to assess one’s own knowledge, has been targeted as a critical learning mechanism in mathematics education. Yet the early childhood origins of metacognition have proven difficult to study. Using a novel nonverbal task and a comprehensive set of metacognitive measures, we provided the strongest evidence to date that young children are metacognitive. We showed that children as young as 5 years made metacognitive “bets” on their numerical discriminations in a wagering task. However, contrary to previous reports from adults, our results showed that children’s metacognition is domain specific: Their metacognition in the numerical domain was unrelated to their metacognition in another domain (emotion discrimination). Moreover, children’s metacognitive ability in only the numerical domain predicted their school-based mathematics knowledge. The data provide novel evidence that metacognition is a fundamental, domain-dependent cognitive ability in children. The findings have implications for theories of uncertainty and reveal new avenues for training metacognition in children.
Keywords
cognition, metacognition, childhood development, cognitive development, mathematical ability, number comprehension
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