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Children's automatic evaluation of self-generated actions is different from adults
Solange Denervaud1,2, Adrien Hess3, David Sander1,3
1Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Campus Biotech, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Developmental Science
|October 22, 2020
Summary
Children exhibit post-error slowing (PES) like adults, but their emotional response to errors differs. Affective processing of errors depends on age and educational approach, with Montessori students showing distinct patterns.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Educational Psychology
Background:
- Performance monitoring (PM) is crucial for learning and decision-making, involving error detection and behavioral adaptation.
- Adults show post-error slowing (PES) and evaluate errors as negative events.
- It's unclear if children exhibit similar error processing and if pedagogy influences it.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether children exhibit post-error slowing (PES) and negative affective processing of errors, similar to adults.
- To determine if educational pedagogy (traditional vs. Montessori) influences children's error processing.
- To compare error processing in children and adults using a standardized task.
Main Methods:
- Adapted a validated decision-making task to measure PES and affective error processing.
- Recruited 8-12-year-old children from traditional (N=56) and Montessori (N=45) schools.
- Included an adult comparison group (N=46).
Main Results:
- Children processed correct actions positively; adults processed errors negatively.
- Post-error slowing (PES) was consistent across all age and pedagogy groups.
- Negative affective processing of errors was present in traditional schoolchildren but absent in Montessori schoolchildren.
Conclusions:
- Post-error slowing (PES) appears to be an age-invariant attentional mechanism.
- Affective processing of response errors is influenced by both age and educational environment.
- Montessori pedagogy may alter how children emotionally respond to errors, differentiating them from traditional schooling.
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