Can young children be more accurate predictors of their recall performance?

Preschoolers persistently predict that they will perform better than they actually can perform on a picture recall task. The current investigation sought to explore a condition under which young children might be able to improve their predictive accuracy. Namely, children were asked to predict their recall twice for the same set of items. Children’s second predictions were significantly less overconfident than their initial predictions for a set of items. However, between trials (when the stimulus items changed), children’s initial predictions remained persistently overconfident. Children appear to have some understanding that past performance can predict future performance when predicting for the same set of items, but they fail to apply this understanding to new sets of stimuli.