Evaluating one’s memory accuracy through metamemory monitoring is crucial for effective learning and decision-making. Early research suggests that preschoolers exhibit signs of metamemory, but the developmental origins of this ability remain unclear. The purpose of this long-term study was to determine whether the children’s behaviours during making memory-related decisions at age two predict metamemory monitoring at age three.
According to one theory, these early behaviors reflect a basic metacognitive system that is present from birth, enabling automatic and unconscious monitoring and control of actions. Preferences for the new items were assessed under both active and passive conditions. Notably, the toddlers’ visual preferences during the passive condition indicated a clear recall of previously studied images.
Toddlers who resisted the impulse to look at the novel items and instead engaged in visual comparison of the response options were more likely to select the correct answers. Behavioural indicators of an early-emerging metamemory monitoring are not limited to eye movements. In self-paced assessments, both older individuals and children required more time to answer questions across cognitive domains, reporting lower confidence levels.
This pre-registered longitudinal study included 176 toddlers between the ages of 25 and 34 months, who were monitored; however, only 157 of them returned for follow-up after one year. Participants completed visual memory tasks, including the recognition of old-new images, during both time points. From a database of families, those who expressed interest in participating in child development studies were recruited from birth records in a town in Northern California.
The stimuli consisted of 160 colourful line drawings of everyday objects and animals familiar to two-year-old toddlers that they would normally recognize from a popular database. Using random selection, four sets of 40 drawings each were produced for counterbalancing, and four more drawings served as practice trials before the eye-tracking version retrieval phase.
Children sat on their parents’ laps, around 60 cm away from the monitor, while the experimenter sat on their left for the eye-tracker version of the task. The stimuli were separated by 10 cm x 10 cm (visual angle 9.53) and 4.45 cm (visual angle 4.24). In a 17-inch Planar (PT1701MU) liquid crystal display (LCD) touchscreen monitor with a resolution of 1280 × 1024, the touchscreen version of the task was conducted. These stimuli were identical to the eye-tracker task in terms of size and spacing.
When three-year-olds engaged in extended visual comparison, they frequently demonstrated high accuracy with low confidence. It means the effective memory retrieval might promote the growth of confidence discrimination. This evidence suggests that the theory of mind (ToM) is not essential for early metamemory monitoring, despite potential connections between ToM and metacognition.
Visual attention and control were considered as promising targets for interventions aimed at enhancing learning and decision-making skills. This study highlighted that the development of metamemory monitoring by age three is predicted by early visual exploration and memory choice behaviours at age two. These results provide an outline for early educational interventions, along with the fundamental role of active engagement in memory tasks for cognitive development.
Reference: Leckey S, Selmeczy D, Ghetti S. Two-year-olds’ visual exploration of response options during memory decisions predicts metamemory monitoring one year later. Nat Commun. 2025;16:5284. doi:10.1038/s41467-025-60273-8
