The simple act of looking and comparing may be the first step toward learning how to judge what we remember, a skill that is fundamental to learning and making decisions.
New research from the University of California, Davis, has found that toddlers who tend to look more closely at and compare paired images during a memory task are more aware of the accuracy of their own memories a year later. This finding connects the earliest process of seeking information with the developing ability to judge the accuracy of memories.
"Although little kids are not necessarily aware about what they are doing when they look at objects, the practice of collecting and evaluating information while trying to make a decision may provide the foundation for the development of memory-introspection skills over time," said lead author Simona Ghetti, a professor of psychology in the College of Letters and Science and Center for Mind and Brain.
The study was published June 11 in Nature Communications.
How kids judge their memories
The paper comes from a longitudinal study Ghetti and her co-authors conducted with 176 toddlers. At 2 years old, the children looked at pairs of images and picked which one they thought had been shown to them already. A year later, they completed the same task, but this time the researchers also asked them how confident they were in their choice.
In both rounds of data collection, the research team monitored the process with eye trackers that could measure how many times the children looked back and forth between the two images.
The study tested metamemory monitoring, which is our ability to judge how well a memory reflects reality. It makes us feel more confident when our memories reflect what we saw or experienced and makes us feel uncertain when our memories are faulty, alerting us to avoid mistakes. This ability is fundamental for learning and making decisions.
Children don't have this skill until they reach 3 or 4 years old. However, even infants look for information they need, often by turning to an adult, which Ghetti said might be a way of evaluating what they remember.
Weighing options builds skills in judging memories
The results showed that the number of times children looked at both images and how often they got the right answer at 2 years of age predicted their ability to accurately judge what they remembered a year later.
This suggests that toddlers who tend to compare their options before deciding might get more practice at thinking about what they remember. This practice led to toddlers being better able to recognize when their memories were accurate or when they made mistakes. They reported feeling more confident after a correct response and more uncertain after a mistake.
A surprising result was that knowing about mental states - their own and others' - as well as the language to describe them, had no connection to being able to judge memories at 3 years old.
"Having a theory of mind and the language to describe mental states may not be essential for the initial emergence of metamemory monitoring," said Sarah Leckey, a former UC Davis Ph.D. graduate student in psychology and first author. "But these abilities may become more relevant later in childhood, when metamemory becomes more sophisticated."
An additional author on the paper is Diana Selmeczy, an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. This study was funded by the National Science Foundation and preparation of the manuscript was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
