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Sunae Kim1 · Atsushi Senju2,3 · Beate Sodian4 · Markus Paulus4 · Shoji Itakura5 · Akiko Okuno5 · Mika Ueno5 · Joelle Proust6

Accepted: 30 November 2021

© The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2021

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Abstract

Prior studies explored the early development of memory monitoring and control. However, little work has examined cross-cultural similarities and differences in metacognitive development in early childhood. In the present research, we investigated a total of 100 Japanese and German preschool-aged children’s memory monitoring and control in a visual perception task. After seeing picture items, some of which were repeated, children were presented with picture pairs, one of which had been presented earlier and the other was a novel item. They then were asked to identify the previously presented picture. Children were also asked to evaluate their confidence about their selection and to sort the responses to be used for being awarded a prize at the end of the test. Both groups similarly expressed more confidence in the accurately remembered items than in the inaccurately remembered items, and their sorting decision was based on their subjective confidence. Japanese children’s sorting more closely corresponded to memory accuracy than German children’s sorting, however. These findings were further confirmed by a hierarchical Bayesian estimation of metacognitive efficiency. The present findings, therefore, suggest that early memory monitoring and control have both culturally similar and diverse aspects. The findings are discussed in light of broader sociocultural influences on metacognition.

Keywords Metacognition · cross-cultural · preschoolers · memory monitoring · memory control

Metacognition – the ability to monitor one’s mental states and processes, and guide one’s behavior accordingly – is fundamentally involved in our everyday decisions. Memory-monitoring and control behaviors are crucial for adaptive human learning. It allows us to decide, for example, when to stop putting effort into learning, to employ learning strategies, or to seek help (e.g., Baars et al., 2020; Gönül et al., 2021). Moreover, some scholars argue that explicit metacognition in humans may have underpinned human cooperation and culture (e.g., Heyes et al., 2020; Shea et al., 2014).

Developmentally, metacognition is firmly present in elementary years (e.g., Koriat & Ackerman, 2010; Schneider & Lockl, 2008), and develops further into adolescence (e.g., Paulus et al., 2014; Schneider, 2008). In recent years, studies have begun to investigate younger children’s nascent meta-cognitive abilities. Children as young as 3 years old display uncertainty monitoring and control behaviors. In a study by Balcomb and Gerken (2008), for example, 3.5-year-old children skipped trials in which they answered incorrectly later, suggesting that they implicitly monitor their memory uncertainty. In addition, preschool-aged children were less confident on incorrectly identified picture items than on correctly identified pictures; when uncertain, they withheld their responses (Lyons & Ghetti, 2013) and sought another person’s help (Coughlin et al., 2015). Interestingly, 18-month-old infants asked for parental help when they did not remember where a toy had been hidden (Goupil et al., 2016) (see also Geurten & Bastin, 2019; Goupil, & Kouider, 2016). Moreover, Hembacher and Ghetti (2014) further investigated both memory monitoring and control in 3- to 5- year-old children. They found metacognitive monitoring, measured by their confidence judgments about their memories of picture items, was present in children as young as 4 years old. The presence of metacognitive control, measured by children’s ability to sort the remembered items for later evaluation for a prize, was also observed in 4- and 5-year- olds and even among some 3-year-olds.

The aforementioned studies, however, have explored the developmental pattern of metacognition by exclusively focusing on European and North American children. This is unfortunate because an answer to whether metacognition is culturally modulated will greatly improve our understanding of the nature and characteristics of human metacognition. More generally, studies of different ethnic and cultural populations will establish the generalizability of the findings to a wider human population (Henrich et al., 2010; Nielsen et al., 2017). Granting that memory monitoring and control are involved in everyday judgments of learning and associated decisions, which themselves are critical for survival, one might expect that memory monitoring and control develop similarly across diferent cultures from early childhood. In a related metacognitive domain, Kim et al. (2020) recently reported no significant difference in assessing their knowledge states between Japanese and German 4-year-olds – both of which seem diferent from Yucatec Mayan children (Kim et al., in press). In these studies, children’s knowledge states of the hidden contents of a container were manipu- lated across conditions and children were asked to verbally report whether they knew the hidden contents. The same children in a separate task were also asked to either agree or decline informing an ignorant person about the hidden contents. In a critical partial knowledge condition, children were shown two toys and were told that one of them would be hidden in the box; then one of the toys was hidden in the box unbeknownst to them. In this condition, children tended to decline informing whereas they tended to respond that they knew what was in the box – with no significant performance difference between Japanese and German children. The informing task did not facilitate Yucatec Mayan children’s performance, however. Further studies should exam- ine the extent to which the informing task is meaningful and congruent with participants' cultural ways in matters such as communication and child-adult interactions (Kim et al., in press). As far as we know, these are the only studies that examined metacognition in young children growing up in non-“WEIRD” cultures (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) (Henrich et al., 2010), and thus our current understanding is limited.

On the other hand, we also have reason to expect that cultural diversity of metacognition might appear early in human development. Importantly, metacognition can be shaped through cultural learning: metacognitive judgments, discrimination, and calibration of metacognitive feelings could be directly and indirectly influenced by social feedback and instruction (see Heyes et al., 2020; see also Loussouarn et al., 2011). First of all, learning and teach- ing is culturally varied (Kline, 2015). For example, Japanese classroom teaching draws attention to individual errors whereas teaching in the USA or Germany lacks – and even avoids –discussing the errors made by individual students (e.g., Tulis, 2013, Eriksson et al., 2020). Furthermore, Japanese teachers prefer to anticipate children’s needs, considering that children should learn to depend on their teacher. In contrast, U.S. teachers prefer to respond to students' explicit expressions of need, considering that children should learn to depend on themselves (Rothbaum et al., 2006). These culturally modulated instructions and teaching may already start in early childhood. Studies provide converging evidence that parental sensitivity in parent-child interaction is understood differently by culture (e.g., Bornstein et al., 1992; Kel- ler et al., 2002). Particularly, Japanese mothers, whose cultural norms emphasize interdependence over autonomy, are more sensitive to their child’s needs than German mothers (Friedlmeier & Trommsdorf, 1999; Rothbaum et al., 2000), which typically facilitates young children’s emotional regulation (e.g., von Suchodoletz et al., 2011). Japanese mothers display child-oriented feelings (e.g., empathy toward the child) whereas German mothers display self-oriented feelings (e.g., anger) when facing conflicts with their children – but Japanese mothers are more likely to intervene in peer conflicts and guide their children to empathize with peers. As a result, Japanese children are more likely to readily accept mothers' demands (e.g., Trommsdorf & Kornadt, 2003; Trommsdorf & Friedlmeier, 1993). Such maternal sensitivity to emotional needs may also occur in the form of informational needs (e.g., offering relevant feedback). Thus, Japanese children as compared to German children are more likely to select teaching ignorant over knowledgeable persons, while German children as compared to Japanese counterparts are more likely to select knowledgeable over ignorant persons to learn from (Kim et al., 2018). These differences might reflect differences in social and cultural attunement to others' knowledge states depending on the role of a learner or a teacher.

One might further reason that, in general, accurate memory monitoring and control could be important to achieve group decision-making and cooperation (Shea et al., 2014). As an interdependent view of the self is more likely to enhance group cooperation than an independent view of the self (e.g., Utz, 2004), the Japanese culture (an interdependent culture) in comparison to their Western independent counterparts (such as Germany) may emphasize an earlier motivation inaccurately reporting what one knows or remembers; Japanese parents might also offer more frequent and appropriate feedback related to error monitoring and control to their children, which should help them to calibrate and accurately report their uncertainty. Specifically, parental feedback may allow children not only to distinguish meta-cognitive from other non-metacognitive feelings but also to distinguish among different metacognitive feelings. It may also involve teaching children an appropriate translation of subjective feelings into conventional/linguistic (both verbal and nonverbal) expressions – and correspondence between different levels of metacognitive feelings (e.g., uncertainty) and linguistic expression.

In the present research, we investigated preschool-aged Japanese and German children’s memory monitoring and control. Our reason for comparing these populations was that we already know– as discussed above – that parenting and teaching styles and early child-parent interactions are guided by different cultural norms and values in Japan and Germany, which might further modulate memory monitoring and control in young children.

Notably, the two cultural groups are comparable in other respects: they belong to highly industrialized countries, where the nuclear families typically include few children, where formal education occurs early on, etc. We also did not expect differences between the two groups of children concerning our experimental approach. Therefore, differences in metacognitive monitoring and control – if obtained – are unlikely to be attributable to differences in the latter features. Because we intended to test both metacognitive monitoring and control, the design of Hembacher and Ghetti (2014) was suitable for our purposes as it examined both metacognitive monitoring and control during preschool years.

Method

Participants

A total of 100 children were tested: 3.5- to 5-year-old Japanese children (N = 54, 28 girls, 26 boys, Mean age = 4.81, range = 3.69 ~ 5.89) and German children (N = 46, 27 girls, 19 boys, Mean age = 4.80, range = 3.71 ~ 5.04) participated. The two groups did not differ in Age t (98) = .049, p = .961. The data from two additional children were excluded from the analyses: one German child due to a technical problem, and one additional German child due to a failure to complete the task (after 8 trials). The sample size was determined based on Hembacher and Ghetti (2014): The total sample size of 98 was considered sufficient to detect the effect size of .25 (Cohen’s d) at the power of 80%. Children from both Germany and Japan came from middle or upper-middle-class families. Fifty-six percent of Japanese mothers and 67% of Japanese fathers had university or graduate degrees. Fifty- nine percent of German mothers and 56% of German fathers had university or graduate degrees. Sixty-seven percent of Japanese mothers and all Japanese fathers were working; all German mothers and fathers were working – a majority of them had white-collar jobs (74% of Japanese parents and 68% of German parents). The present research was approved by the ethics committee at Ludwig Maximilian University - Munich in Germany and Kyoto University in Japan and was conducted according to the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from the parents.

Design and procedure We closely followed Hembacher and Ghetti (2014) except for several changes as described below. The original research study included young 3-year- old American children. We tested older rather than younger 3-year-olds for the following reason. During our pilot test, an entire session took about 30 minutes; maintaining their attention throughout testing turned out to be extremely challenging for younger 3-year-old children. Individual children were tested by a female experimenter in a lab or a sepa- rate room in their kindergarten. Children were presented with 20 picture stimuli one at a time for 2 seconds on a computer screen. During our pilot testing, we confirmed that both Japanese and German children in the age range of 3.5-5 were familiar with the picture items. The order of the presentation of the picture stimuli was fixed and maintained across participants. Unlike the original study in which children were tested in two separate sessions each involving 20 trials and each session a week apart from one another, we tested children in one session of 20 trials. Importantly, as in the original study, half of the picture items were presented once, and the other, twice. Children were asked to touch the screen as soon as the pictured item appeared on the screen to ensure that they paid attention (“I’m going to show you some pictures and please touch the picture as soon as it appears on the screen. Okay?”). After this encod- ing phase, children received successively a retrieval task, a confidence judgment task, and a sorting task. In the retrieval task, children were presented with the picture pairs, one of which was previously presented during the encoding phase and, the other, a novel item, and were asked to choose the picture that they saw before (“Which one did you see before? Can you point at the picture you saw before?”). The novel- familiar item pairs were predetermined and their order was then randomized and fixed across trials. Upon their choice, the non-chosen picture item disappeared from the screen and the confidence scale appeared below the chosen item. Then the confidence judgment task followed. In this task, children were asked about their confidence concerning their picture choice in the retrieval task, using a 3-point scale of, “not so sure”, “kind of sure”, and“really sure”(“How sure are you? Can you point at one of the circles?”). Unlike Hembacher and Ghetti (2014) who used a confidence scale of corresponding face pictures, we used a 3-point scale of circles with increasing size and intensifying colors – because we reasoned that facial expressions of uncertainty might be culturally specific. Like in Hembacher and Ghetti (2014), we

Fig. 1 After the encoding phase, children received a retrieval task (A), a confidence judgment task (B), and a sorting task (C & D)

gave the same training trials with feedback concerning the usage of the scale. The experimenter explained the meaning of each circle corresponding to“not so sure”, “kind of sure”, or“really sure” and feedback was given for the correspondence- ence between children’s behaviors and confidence judgments during the training (“Okay, there are three circles. If you are not sure about your answer, whether you saw the picture, then you should select this circle (pale red); if you are sort of sure, you should select this circle (middle red); if you are sure, then you should select this circle (bold red)?”). Children were then asked, “How sure are you? Can you point at one of the circles?” followed by“Okay, can you tell me, how sure you are?”If children’s verbal response matched pointing at the circle then, the experimenter said, “Right. This circle means that you are sure/kind of sure/not sure. So it is right that you pointed at this circle.”If not match: “No, look, this circle means, that you are sure/kind of sure/not sure. You said that you are sure/kind of sure/not sure, so you should point at this circle.”Finally, after children made their confidence judgments, they received the sorting task to assess children’s behavioral control based on their subjective confidence. In this task, children were asked to choose either a box with a smiley face with open eyes or another box with a smiley face with closed eyes (“To which smiley face would you give your picture?”). They were explained that only those picture items they chose to put in the box with an open eye smiley face would be evaluated for a later prize (“Okay, during the game, you can give the pictures to either this smiley face with open eyes (pointing) or with this smiley face with closed eyes (pointing). If you think you did a good job and if you want me to look at your answer, then you can give the pictures to this smiley face (pointing) with open eyes. If you think you make a mistake and don’t want me to look at them, then you can give the pictures to this smiley face with closed eyes (pointing). I will look at only those pictures that you give to this one (pointing at a smiley with open eyes) and you will get a prize if you have done a good job on only those pictures with this smiley face (pointing at the one with open eyes). Sounds good?”). Once they chose one of the boxes, they would see the lid of the box of their choice opened with the picture of their choice next to the box. Again, as in the original study, we administered the training trials with feedback (“Okay, do you want me to look at the picture later because you think you’ve done a good job or do you not want me to look at the picture because you think you might make a mistake?”If children answered cor- rectly, then they were told: “Yes. The smiley with the open/ closed eyes means that I will look/won’t look at the picture later.”If they answered incorrectly then: “No. The smiley with the open/closed eyes means that I will look/won’t look at the picture later. If you want me to look/ not look at the picture later, you should give your picture to the smiley with the open/closed eyes.”). See Fig. 1 for the pictorial layout of the retrieval, confidence judgment, and sorting tasks.

Data analyses We followed the analyses by Hembacher and Ghetti (2014) except for the following changes. First, we included Country as a factor. Unlike Hembacher and Ghetti (2014) we included all children – for example, those who did not have inaccurate responses; those with chance memory performance – which resulted in missing data in some cells. To handle the missing data as well as repeated measures, we used Linear Mixed models. Unlike Hembacher and Ghetti (2014), we treated Age as a continuous variable rather than a categorical variable. Finally, we adopted a hierarchical Bayesian estimation of efficiency, called HMeta-d (Fleming, 2017), and compared metacognitive efficiency between our two cultural groups. Meta-d' (e.g., Maniscalco & Lau, 2012), as an index of metacognitive sensitivity, measures how well an individual’s confidence judgment discriminates between accurate and inaccurate responses and controls for type 1 sensitivity (or d' how well an individual categorizes stimuli), type 1 response bias (tendency to select one stimulus classification more often than the other), or type 2 response bias (tendency to give high or low conf- dence estimates). In particular, by comparing directly to d' (as it is expressed in the same units), meta-d' provides a measure of an individual’s metacognitive efficiency: it is ideal if meta-d'/d' (Mratio or metacognitive efficiency) = 1. Estimated log (Mratio), based on signal detection theory, provides an index of metacognitive efficiency and HMeta-d provides group-level estimates of metacognitive efficiency (Fleming, 2017). Comparing estimates of group-level meta-cognitive efficiency, the 95% highest-density interval (HDI) of difference of the group parameters (computed from the posterior samples) allowed us to test whether one group had higher metacognitive efficiency than the other. HMeta-d controls for confounds such as memory performance or con- fence bias and incorporates subject level uncertainty into the model; moreover, it performs well with small data sets (Fleming, 2017) as was the case in our study. We measured HMeta-d for the confidence-memory accuracy and the sorting-memory accuracy.