Chapter 9

Question 1

Metacognition

Answer 1

s knowledge about cognition. Flavell (1979) defined this concept as any cognitive activity or knowledge that takes an aspect of cognitive activity as its cognitive object. An example of this is the conscious use of cognitive strategies to increase your performance.

Question 2

Meta-memory

Answer 2

knowledge about memory

Question 3

Executive functioning

Answer 3

is the ability to regulate behaviour and thoughts, planning behaviour and inhibit inappropriate behaviour

Question 4

To develop metacognition, children must..

Answer 4

be able to treat cognition itself as an object of cognition.

Question 5

Metacognition and meta-representation are closely linked, difference?

Answer 5

However, metacognition is focused on knowledge about someone’s own mind and not about that of others, such as meta-representation. (theory of mind)

Question 6

Intentional memory

Answer 6

which is about procedures (procedural metamemory), requiring recognition that memory activity is necessary (‘metastrategic knowing’) and knowing the kinds of activity that may enhance performance (knowing ‘how’).

Question 7

(‘metastrategic knowing’)

Answer 7

requiring recognition that memory activity is necessary.

Question 8

Wellman concluded that an important aspect of metamemory development is..

Answer 8

is the ability to consider the relationship between various metamemory variables (Wellman (1978) investigated the concept of 5- and 10-year-olds for the different variables. He showed them pictures. For some pictures, a single variable was used, such as a picture of a boy who had to remember eight items and a picture of a boy who had to remember 18 items. Both the 5- and 10-year-olds understood that the boy who had to remember 18 items had a more difficult task. If there were two variables, for example, that one boy had to remember 18 items over a long time and another boy had to remember 18 items over a short time, the 5-year-old children performed worse.

Question 9

Self-monitoring

Answer 9

Is another aspect of metamemory. It is the ability to keep track of where you are with respect to your memory goals.

Question 10

Self-regulation

Answer 10

is another related concept. This is the ability to plan, manage and evaluate your own memory behaviour.

Question 11

How is self-monitoring measured?

Answer 11

Is measured in terms of ease-of-learning judgments, feeling-of-knowing and judgments-of-learning (assessment of learning over a short-term and long-term period). The latter is to estimate what has been learned immediately after a list of items has been studied and again after a few minutes.

Question 12

Dufresne and Kobasigawa (1989) investigated whether children were able to adjust their study time to the difficulty of items they had to learn. They allowed children aged 6, 8, 10 and 12 to learn easy word pairs (dog-cat) and difficult word pairs (frog book). They recorded how much time the children spent learning the more difficult word pairs and learning the easier word pairs. Children aged 10 and 12 spent significantly more time on the more difficult word pairs. Also, the 8-year-olds spent slightly more time on the more difficult word pairs. The 6-year-olds did understand the difference between the more difficult pairs and the easier pairs, but did not yet have any meta memorial knowledge of how to study the more difficult pairs. Conclusion?

Answer 12

They concluded that younger children are able to use self-monitoring, but that they do not necessarily use it to improve their memory performance.

Question 13

ease-of-learning judgments.

Answer 13

The ability to be able to make good predictions about their memory performance

Question 14

Visé and Schneider concluded that the ease-of-learning assessment is a better index of self-control for older children than for younger children. Why?

Answer 14

Young children are not good at making these assessments. This is not necessarily due to problems in self-monitoring. Visé and Schneider (2000) investigated this and concluded that it was because young children think that if they put a lot of effort into something, they can do it. Their wishes are the same as their estimates. It is therefore not so much a matter of a lack of self-monitoring.

Question 15

When are children able to make good judgements of their learning? (judgement-of-learning tasks)

Answer 15

When there’s some time in between.

Question 16

What ensures the development of children’s metamemory self regulation or self monitoring?

Answer 16

Self regulation. Self monitoring does not develop with age.

Question 17

Feeling-of-knowing

Answer 17

Is a metacognitive process to predict the likelihood that they will be able to remember in the future, information which they currently cannot recall.

Question 18

The conclusion from the studies into ease-of-learning judgments, judgments-of-learning and feeling-of-knowing judgments is that..

Answer 18

self-monitoring in young children is fairly accurate, because children perform about the same as adults. Self-regulation is what continues to develop into adolescence and is therefore also responsible for the development of meta-memory.

Question 19

Geurten and Bastin (2018) concluded in a study that implicit metacognitive knowledge can guide task performance in children as young as..

Answer 19

2.5 years

Question 20

Source monitoring

Answer 20

is the attribution of the correct source of one’s memory, knowledge and beliefs

Question 21

When does source monitoring develop?

Answer 21

4-8 years.

Question 22

Source monitoring develops between 4 and 8 years and depends on the nature of the material to be remembered and its salience to the child. Research shows that children who have better metamemory perform significantly better on memory tasks. The relationships are bi-directional:

Answer 22

metamemory influences behaviour and this in turn ensures better metamemory.

Question 23

In research with adults, an EEG marker has been discovered that appears to relate to performance monitoring.. what is it?

Answer 23

This is an ERP labelled ‘error related negativity’ or ERN. ERN in adults usually occurs during speeded response tasks when the adult commits an error. ERN increases with age.

Question 24

Inhibitory control

Answer 24

s the ability to inhibit responses to irrelevant stimuli while pursuing a cognitively represented goal

Question 25

A typical error seen in adults with frontal cortex damage is in card sorting-

Answer 25

If a patient is sorting a pack of cards according to a rule (e.g. colour) and the rule is then changed (e.g. to shape), the patient finds it difficult to change their sorting rule and continues to sort according to colour but still knows they are doing it wrong but they are unable to inhibit their behaviour (Diamond, 1990).

Question 26

A central element in neo-Piagetian theories is the notion of the ‘processing capacity’ of the brain (i.e. working memory) explain!

Answer 26

Neo-Piagetian theories suggested that the size of available processing capacity placed an upper limit on children’s cognitive performance, and that biological factors (still unknown) regulated the gradual shift in this upper limit with age (i.e. the older you get, the more capacity and better working memory you have).

Question 27

Dimensional Change Card Sort Task’ (DCCS)

Answer 27

is a test where the participant has to sort cards according to different rules or dimensions. For example, you are asked to sort first by colour and then by shape.

Question 28

Children aged 5 had no problem with this, but the 3- and 4-year-olds had difficulty with switching their sorting strategies between the first two sets of five trials. In the third set of five trials they performed at chance level. Fyre et al. checked whether the poor performance was due to the shapes being abstract and unfamiliar, by using pictures of boats and rabbits, but it was not the explaining factor…

Answer 28

They concluded that the ability of children to make judgments on one dimension while ignoring the other dimension emerges between 3 and 5 years. Another explanation for the results was that children cannot inhibit the rule used before the strategy-switch, even though they are aware of the other rule.

Question 29

In another study (Jacques et al., 1999), the task was performed by puppets, so that an incorrect motor response from the children was excluded. The children just had to judge whether the puppets were playing correctly. The children rated the behaviour as incorrect when the dolls played according to the second rule and also if the puppets played according to the first rule in the second five trials, in which the second rule had to be applied… so?

Answer 29

This data supports the idea that the important factor in not being able to follow sorting rules is a representational conflict rather than the inhibition of a response.

Question 30

Cool executive functioning

Answer 30

refers to purely cognitive tasks

Question 31

hot executive functioning

Answer 31

also includes making decisions about events that have emotionally significant consequences.

Question 32

When does hot executive functioning develop? (Think about the studies with the M&M’s, and gambling all the time)

Answer 32

3-4 years.

Question 33

Conclusions of delays of gratification tests, like day and night task

Answer 33

concluded that older children were better at controlling inhibition and that girls performed better than boys.

Question 34

Diamond and Taylor (1996) conducted research with the conflicting tests and used the day and night test mentioned. They also used a test in which the experimenter tapped on the table with a stick. If he tapped once, the child had to tap twice, if he tapped twice, the child had to tap once. Children aged 3-7 were tested and the older children performed better. The performance in later trials, however, decreased. Conclusion?

Answer 34

They concluded that children between 3 and 6 exercise inhibitory control. It was suggested that errors were caused by errors in inhibition, forgetting a rule, or being unable to switch rules. The researchers also thought that growing control over inhibition is related to the development of the frontal cortex.

Question 35

arlson and Moses (2001) focused on planning. They gave a battery of tests for executive functioning to 107 3-and 4-year olds. Both delay and conflict tests were used and measured inhibitory control. They also included a planning test. In this test there was a keyboard with four keys that had different colours. The children were only allowed to touch one key at a time with their index finger. They had to play certain sequences until the experimenter said ‘stop’. The number of sequences that they played without skipping a key or touching a key twice was scored. Results?
age, gender and verbal performance

Answer 35

The results for the inhibitory control showed that the score on the battery was correlated with age, gender, verbal performance and the scores that parents attributed to their children for inhibitory control. The researchers concluded that inhibitory control could indeed be measured regardless of age, gender and verbal performance. The task that tested planning was of poor quality, because no action had to be planned when touching the keyboard and therefore there was no real cognitive activity in this task.

Question 36

The Tower of Hanoi, the truck-loading task and the kitten-delivery task. -

Answer 36

All three tasks involved reasoning according to the ‘if-if-then principle’

Question 37

truck-loading task

Answer 37

‘if the invitations can only be picked up from the top of the stack and if the pink house is last, then the pink invitation must be loaded first’. Older children perform better on this task than 3-4 year olds.

Question 38

Brain cortex used in adults vs children during a go and no go test

Answer 38

The children performed worse than adults in the incongruent and no-go conditions, but did give the right answer in 90% of the cases. Under these conditions, the brains of children were associated with activity in the left ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex and in the brains of adults with activity in the right ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex. If the children who performed the same as adults were studied separately, there was more activity in the left cortex, in contrast to the expectation that the activity would rather take place in the right cortex

Question 39

Analogical reasoning

Answer 39

is the ability to reason about novel problems based on the relationship between this novel problem and a familiar problem. Children of 4 years of age can already do this.

Question 40

at what age children can solve analogies? (if they had an example?

Answer 40

Singer-Freeman et al. (2005) investigated 2-year-olds who could make analogies if a similar problem had first been solved by the experimenter. For example, they first showed children how to attach a rubber band to two plexiglass poles so that an orange could roll across. The child was allowed to play with the orange for a while and then they were asked if they could let a bird fly. The child received a model with a tree on one side and on the other, an elastic band and a toy bird. The idea was that the child should do the same as the experimenter had done with the rubber band.
In the control condition (children who had not had an example) 6% of the 2-year-olds came up with an accurate solution and in the example condition 28%. If hints were given to make the analogy, 48% came to the right solution. These results are similar to the spontaneous results found in adults and 4-year-olds. When children notice the relationship between different problems, it is possible that they will transfer their knowledge and therefore perform metacognition.

Question 41

Brown et al. (1986) investigated problem analogy on the basis of the ‘Genie problem’. In this problem, a genie moves from one location to another and must take his jewellery with him without damaging the jewellery. The solution is to roll them in his flying carpet. The children were presented with this solution and they were asked questions about the situation, so that they received metacognitive support. Then the ‘Easter Bunny problem’ was presented in which an Easter Bunny is a bit late with delivering easter-eggs and theref

Answer 41

70% of children aged 4 and 5 years came spontaneously with the right solution based on the analogy. For children in the control condition (who had not received extensive questions about the situation) this was only 20%. The conclusion was that children find it easy to recognize similarities in problems as long as they still had the relational structure of the previous problem in their memory. This is reinforced by the metacognitive support

Question 42

Dias and Harris (1988) had children aged 5 and 6 solve syllogisms and had one group solve these problems in a game condition, where they could use toys that depicted the syllogisms. A second group simply had to listen to the syllogisms without being allowed to use toys. The children in the game condition performed well in solving the syllogisms when the syllogisms were about known facts, about unknown facts and about problems that contradicted facts. The children in the listening condition only performed well if the syllogisms were about known facts. In a follow-up study the children in the game condition were offered syllogisms that conflict with factual information and it was said that it was possible on another planet (i.e. cats that bark). Did the experiment group still perform better? -

Answer 42

Yes, Again they performed better than the control group and the conclusion was that children can reason deductively, even in conditions that are in conflict with facts, but only if the problems were presented in a context of play.

Question 43

the selection task

Answer 43

This method focuses on ‘if p, then q’ reasoning. For example: if the envelope is sealed, it has a stamp on it When it comes to familiar situations, adults perform well on this task, but when it comes to novel situations, they perform well in only 10% of the cases.