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Twenty-month-old infants can monitor and communicate their uncertainty. By strategically asking for help, they improved performance and avoided errors, demonstrating early metacognitive abilities.

Keywords:
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Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Comparative psychology

Background:

  • Metacognition, or uncertainty monitoring, enables adaptive decision-making.
  • While many animals exhibit metacognition, only humans explicitly communicate uncertainty.
  • The developmental emergence of uncertainty communication in humans is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether 20-month-old infants can monitor and communicate their uncertainty nonverbally.
  • To determine if infants use this communication strategically to improve task performance.

Main Methods:

  • A nonverbal memory-monitoring task involving remembering a toy's location.
  • An experimental group of infants could ask for help nonverbally when uncertain.
  • A control group made decisions without the option to ask for help.

Main Results:

  • Infants in the experimental group strategically used the option to ask for help.
  • Asking for help was selectively employed to avoid errors and decline difficult choices.
  • Infants who asked for help demonstrated improved overall performance.

Conclusions:

  • 20-month-old infants possess the ability to monitor their own uncertainty.
  • Infants can nonverbally communicate their uncertainty to others.
  • This ability is used strategically to achieve goals, indicating early metacognitive development.