A comparison of adults’ and children's metacognition for yes/no recognition decisions

• Children display adaptive metacognition in many memory settings, but poor metamemory in eyewitness identification.
• We tested whether children's metamemory is poor in a simple word task involving discrimination of seen from unseen items.
• Children displayed poorer memory (d′) and substantially more overconfidence than adults.
• No evidence of difference in other metamemory measures: response bias, confidence resolution, or free-report performance.

Basic metacognitive development research suggests that metacognitive abilities develop before adolescence. However, this research has not used tasks that require the discrimination of seen from unseen stimuli, an important element of real-world recognition tasks such as eyewitness identification. We tested the idea that children would be less able to monitor and control the accuracy of their memories in such a task. We used a word-pair recognition task to compare children's (109 8–12 year olds) and adult's (102 first-year psychology students) ability to adaptively make, monitor, and control the reporting of yes/no recognition decisions about familiar stimuli in a task with no demand effects. We found that adults were substantially better at discriminating old from new stimuli, but no evidence of an age difference in metacognitive ability. Although these results do not explain children's poor metacognition in eyewitness identification, they suggest potential steps to improve children's identification performance.