Metacognitive monitoring of oneself and others: developmental changes during childhood and adolescence

The current study examined the development of people's knowledge about others' learning and memory processes. To this end, participants of four different age groups (6- and 7-year-old children, 8- to 10-year-old children, 14- and 15-year-old adolescents, and adults) observed another person performing a paired associate learning task, allocating either little or more time to the paired associates. Participants were asked to estimate the likelihood of recall by giving judgments of learning (JoLs) for every item pair (Other Task). In addition, we manipulated whether participants performed an equivalent task themselves (Self Task) before or after the evaluation of the other. Our results show significant developmental effects, with the older two age groups, but not the younger two age groups, differentiating between the short and long video sequences when giving JoLs in the Other Task. Moreover, the results revealed an impact of having performed the Self Task beforehand on participants' JoLs in the Other Task, suggesting that metacognitive knowledge about the other is informed by experiential cues during the actual (i.e., firsthand), learning process.