The developmental path of metacognition from toddlerhood to early childhood and its influence on later memory performance.

Recently, several studies have suggested that metacognition emerges early in infancy and toddlerhood. However, to date, the developmental trajectory of these early metacognitive monitoring and control processes and their influence on children's later memory functioning remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to longitudinally document the development of metacognition between the ages of 2.5 and 4.5 years and to examine the link between these early metacognitive skills and later memory performance. To do so, 69 children initially aged 29-33 months old (NT0 = 69; 32 females; Mage = 32.3 months; SD = 1.6) were tested at three time points (12-month intervals) with a recognition memory paradigm designed to assess both metacognitive monitoring, through retrospective confidence judgment, and metacognitive control, through a cue selection task (i.e., children had the opportunity to ask for a cue to help them change their memory decision). In addition, at the last session, an episodic memory task (story recall) was also administered. Our results revealed an improvement in monitoring and control processes between 2.5 and 4.5 years with above-chance performance from around age 3.5. Mixed-effects modeling also indicated that metacognitive monitoring at ages 2.5 and 4.5, but not-unexpectedly-metacognitive control, was related to children's memory performance at age 4.5. Overall, our results provide evidence to enhance our understanding of the developmental course of metacognition from toddlerhood to early childhood and suggest that metacognitive processes are involved in memory performance much earlier than had previously been shown. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The influence of irrelevant emotionally negative stimuli on early and late retrospective metacognitive judgements.

It is well established that negative emotions influence a range of cognitive processes. How these emotions influence the metacognitive judgement individuals make about their own performance and whether this influence is similar depending on the conditions under which metacognition is assessed, however, is far less understood. The primary aim of this study was to determine whether exposure to emotional stimuli could influence metacognitive judgements made under short or long time constraints. A total sample of 144 young adults (aged 18-35 years) was recruited and asked to complete an arithmetic strategy selection task under emotional or neutral condition. Following each strategy selection trial, participants also provided a retrospective confidence judgement (RCJ). Both strategy selection and RCJ were collected under short or long time constraints (1,500 vs. 2,500 ms for strategy selection and 800 vs. 1,500 ms for RCJ). In addition to replicating previous findings showing lower rates of better strategy selection under negative emotions compared with neutral condition, an effect of negative stimuli on the accuracy of participants' confidence judgements was found, but only if participants had a short time limit to make their second-level evaluation. Such findings are consistent with the hypothesis that exposure to emotional stimuli disturbs early, but not late metacognitive processes and have important implications to further our understanding of the role of emotions on metacognition.

Parental reminiscing training and preschoolers' memory and metacognition: A randomized controlled trial.

This randomized controlled trial explored the effects of parental reminiscing training on preschoolers' memory and metacognition among French-speaking White parents and their typically developing children (24 females, 20 males; Mmonths = 49.64) in Belgium. Participants were assigned, with age stratification, to the immediate intervention (n = 23) or waiting-list group (n = 21). The assessments were conducted by blind evaluators before the intervention, immediately after, and 6 months later. Resulting specifically from the intervention, parents sustainably improved their reminiscing style (e.g., greater provision of feedback and use of metamemory comments). The effects of the intervention on children's outcomes were, however, less clear. Based on the social-constructivist approach, such effects could be expected to occur later. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

How well do you think you remember your personal past? French validation of the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART) and exploration of age effect.

ABSTRACTThis study aimed to validate a French version of the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART), a 21-item self-report questionnaire developed by Berntsen, D., Hoyle, R. H., & Rubin, D. C. (2019; The Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART): A measure of individual differences in autobiographical memory. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8(3), 305-318) examining the subjective quality people attribute to their autobiographical memories. It measures seven distinct but correlated dimensions of memories' quality varying between individuals: vividness, narrative coherence, reliving, rehearsal, visual imagery, scene, and life-story relevance. 373 participants aged from 18 to 87 years old were invited to complete the questionnaire by rating on a 7-point Likert scale the degree to which they agree with each item. Demographic data and information about their perception of their memory functioning and satisfaction were also collected. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the initial seven-factor structure of the ART. Moreover, results showed desirable psychometric properties, with good internal consistency (.94) and test-retest reliability (.83). This scale was also correlated with participants' perception of memory functioning in daily life. However, there was no correlation with age, confirming prior studies showing that the subjective quality of autobiographical memories does not decline with age. This study thus provides proof of the good psychometric properties of the French version of the ART and promotes its use to explore the subjective quality of autobiographical memories in clinical populations.

Preschoolers' memory recall of new information: relation to parental reminiscing.

The influence of parental reminiscing style (the way parents discuss past events with their children) on the development of children's autobiographical memory has been well documented. The specific mechanisms involved in this effect, however, remain unknown. We explored the association between specific components of parental reminiscing and preschoolers' episodic memory. Fifty-three parent-child dyads (MChild Age = 53.13 months, 29 females) from Belgium were tested twice within a delay of about nine months. At the first time point, parental reminiscing style was assessed via a parent-child discussion of a prior standardised event (a museum visit) focusing on both the structure of parental interactions and the addressed content. At each time point, children were administered with story-recall tasks in the form of true-false recognition about previously heard stories. Generalised linear mixed-effect models were conducted on an item-by-item basis. Results indicated that parental reminiscing is associated with preschoolers' recognition memory performance at both time points, but not all reminiscing components equally influence children's performance. Specifically, parents' concretisations and metamemory talk were found to impact children's memory. The identification of these components provided insights for exploring the processes underlying the reminiscing-memory influence (in-depth encoding of information, binding processes, and metacognition).

Training arithmetical skills when finger counting and working memory cannot be used: A single case study in a child with cerebral palsy.

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) are at greater risk of mathematical learning disabilities due to associated motor and cognitive limitations. However, there is currently little evidence on how to support the development of arithmetic skills within such a specific profile. The aim of this single-case study was to assess the effectiveness of a neuropsychological rehabilitation of arithmetic skills in NG, a 9-year-old boy with CP who experienced math learning disability and cumulated motor and short-term memory impairments. This issue was explored combining multiple-baseline and changing-criterion designs. The intervention consisted of training NG to solve complex additions applying calculation procedures with a tailor-made computation tool. Based on NG's strengths, in accordance with evidence-based practice in psychology, the intervention was the result of a co-construction process involving N, his NG's parents and professionals (therapist and researchers). Results were analyzed by combining graph visual inspections with non-parametric statistics for single-case designs (NAP-scores). Analyses showed a specific improvement in NG's ability to solve complex additions, which maintained for up to 3 weeks after intervention. The training effect did not generalize to his ability to perform mental additions, and to process the symbolic magnitude.

Relations between parental metacognitive talk and children's early metacognition and memory.

After decades of research suggesting that metacognition-that is, processes whereby people monitor and regulate their cognitive performance-did not emerge and is not related to children's performance until late childhood, recent studies have provided evidence that even preverbal infants can access their internal states. The existence of this basic metacognition raises the question of the variables influencing its development at such a young age and whether such early skills could predict successful cognitive performance. The current study had two main goals: (a) exploring the relation between parental metacognitive style and children's early metacognition and (b) determining whether these early metacognitive skills can predict children's memory performance. To this end, 2.5- to 4.5-year-old children (N = 72) and their parents were recruited. To assess parental metacognitive style, parent-child dyads were invited to participate in a 15-min session during which they played memory games. The parents' speech during this session was later coded for metacognitive content. Children's memory was assessed using cued recall and recognition tests. During one of these recognition tests, participants had the opportunity to ask for a cue to help them decide whether their response was correct (i.e., metacognitive measure). Results revealed that parental metacognitive style predicted both children's metacognitive accuracy and memory performance. Interestingly, a mediation effect of children's metacognitive skills on the relation between parental style and memory performance was found. These findings suggest that environmental factors such as parental metacognitive style are related to children's early metacognition, which in turn is linked to children's memory development.

The use of distraction to improve episodic memory in ageing: A review of methods and theoretical implications.

Healthy ageing is characterized by changes in several cognitive functions, including episodic memory and inhibition. While the age-related decrease in the ability to inhibit irrelevant stimuli is often associated with lower performance, especially in episodic memory, some studies have highlighted the boosting effect of distraction in several tasks in older adults, including episodic memory tasks related to recollection. The aim of this article is to review and compare previous studies according to specific study features and to consider the results in light of the dual-process model of recollection and familiarity that were used by the authors of the reviewed articles. This work led to the identification of two major points of comparison between the studies: the timeline of the distraction intervention and the implicit nature of the processes at play, which both allowed for different implications to the relationship with recollection. The use of distraction in memory tasks can enhance episodic memory, and especially recollective processes, due to specific actions at encoding and retrieval. These findings open the door to further investigations but also raise several questions concerning the role of implicit processes and the negative impact of distraction, for example. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Influence of emotional stimuli on metacognition: A study in arithmetic.

We investigate the role of negative emotional stimuli on direct and indirect metacognition, and document age-related differences in this role during adulthood. Participants were presented with negative or neutral pictures while asked to select which of two available strategies was the better strategy to find approximate estimates of two-digit multiplication problems. Following each strategy selection, participants provided either a direct (confidence judgment; Expt. 1) or an indirect (opt-out judgment; Expt. 2) evaluation of their strategy choice. Negative emotional stimuli decreased metacognitive accuracy for arithmetic strategy selection, but only when indirect metacognitive measures were collected. No differences were found when direct metacognitive judgments were requested. The effects of emotional stimuli on indirect metacognition and lack of effects on direct metacognition were found in both young and older adults. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the effects of emotion on metacognition in young and older adults.

Is the combination of behavioral activation and attention training technique effective to reduce depressive symptomatology? A multiple case study.

Background: This study tested whether the combination of BATD and Attention Training Technique (ATT) is effective to reduce depressive symptomatology and investigate the mechanisms of action underlying the effectiveness of treatment with a multiple N-of-1 trials. Methods: Nine adults with depressive symptoms were randomly included in three different combinations of BATD and ATT, concurrent in Condition 1 and sequential in Conditions 2 and 3 (ATT followed by BATD and BATD followed by ATT, respectively). The sequential components allow investigating the specific changes that occur during the two distinct treatment phases. Multiple self-report and pre-post-assessments were conducted on generic mental health measures (depressive symptoms, life functioning, mood, and well-being) and intervention-specific measures (behavioral activation, behavioral avoidance, self-focused attention, cognitive control and rumination), with two-week and three-month follow-up assessments. We also measured treatment adherence with treatment attendance, homework compliance and a clinical interview. Results: Participants' attendance, homework compliance and satisfaction were acceptable in the three conditions, with higher adherence in Condition 1 and Condition 3. Eight participants out of nine reported a reduction in depressive symptomatology and five an improvement in well-being. Most of their progress was maintained 2 weeks after the intervention but not 3 months later. Conditions 1 and 2 seemed to be associated with a higher response to generic mental health measures in comparison with Condition 3. The three conditions were not associated with consistent changes in intervention-specific measures, except for rumination with five participants out of nine reporting an improvement in rumination immediately after the intervention and eight participants 2 weeks after the intervention. The concurrent format was associated with a better improvement in rumination immediately after the intervention. No specific changes of self-focused attention and rumination characterized ATT, and no specific changes of behavioral activation, behavioral avoidance and rumination characterized BATD. Conclusion: Our three interventions were judged acceptable and showed positive short-term benefit for generic mental health measures and rumination maintained 2 weeks later, but not 3 months later. Results suggest that five sessions of concurrent treatment could be a better option than sequential formats. However, our data did not support the specificity of ATT and BATD treatments.

Feeling the ease: How the use of oral motor fluency changes in amnesia.

The present study examined the evolution observed in amnesic patients' use of motor fluency when making recognition memory decisions. In this experiment, 9 patients with amnesia and 18 matched controls were presented with two recognition memory tasks composed of 3 types of items: (1) natural words, (2) nonwords difficult to pronounce, and (3) nonwords easy to pronounce, the latter having been shown to be processed in a surprisingly fluent manner as long as participants can articulate them at a subvocal level (i.e., oral motor fluency). Our results provide evidence that the motor-movement manipulation was successful to induce a fluency effect. More specifically, data revealed that both amnesic patients and control participants showed a pattern of response consistent with the use of fluency as a cue to memory for studied items. However, only control participants relied on fluency to increase their rate of "yes" responses for unstudied items. These results suggest that patients with amnesia set a more conservative response criterion before relying on oral motor fluency, showing a pattern consistent with the idea that fluency is only used as a cue to memory when it exceeds a certain threshold. These findings are discussed in terms of adaptative metacognition strategies implemented by amnesic patients to reduce fluency-based memory errors as well as in terms of the variations that seem to occur in these strategies depending on the type of fluency that is experienced.

Boosting Familiarity-Based Memory Decisions in Alzheimer's Disease: The Importance of Metacognition.

OBJECTIVE: Recent studies in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have suggested that AD patients are not always able to rely on their feeling of familiarity to improve their memory decisions to the same extent as healthy participants. This underuse of familiarity in AD could result from a learned reinterpretation of fluency as a poor cue for memory that would prevent them to attribute a feeling of fluency to a previous encounter. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether AD patients could relearn the association between processing fluency and past exposure after being repeatedly exposed to situations where using this association improves the accuracy of their memory decisions. METHOD: Thirty-nine patients with probable AD were recruited and asked to complete several recognition tests. During these tests, participants were put either in a condition where the positive contingency between fluent processing and previous encounters with an item was systematically confirmed (intervention condition) or in a condition where there was no correlation between fluency and prior exposure (control condition). The efficacy of the intervention was evaluated at three time points (baseline, posttest, and 3-month follow-up). RESULTS: Our results indicated that all AD patients do not benefit to the same extent from the training. Two variables appeared to influence the likelihood that participants increase and maintain their reliance on the fluency cues after the intervention: the ability to detect the fluency manipulation and the preservation of implicit metacognitive skills. CONCLUSION: These findings indicate the importance of metacognition for inferential attribution processes in memory.

Measuring Impulsivity in Children: Adaptation and Validation of a Short Version of the UPPS-P Impulsive Behaviors Scale in Children and Investigation of its Links With ADHD.

Objective: Impulsivity is a multifaceted construct known to play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of a wide range of problematic behaviors and psychological disorders in children. Method: In this study, we adapted the short French adult version of the UPPS-P (urgency-premeditation-perseverance-sensation seeking-positive urgency) Impulsive Behaviors Scale for use with children (short UPPS-P-C) and tested its psychometric properties. Results: Confirmatory factor analyses conducted on a sample of 425 children (aged 8-14 years) supported the five-factor structure of the scale. Additional analyses emphasized the good internal and test-retest reliability of the short UPPS-P-C. Furthermore, our results also revealed that lack of premeditation, positive urgency, and negative urgency subscales were able to discriminate between children diagnosed with ADHD and their matched controls. Conclusion: These results suggest that the short UPPS-P-C may be considered as a promising time-saving tool to assess impulsivity traits in healthy children and in children with psychiatric disorders.

Impaired explicit self-awareness but preserved behavioral regulation in patients with Alzheimer disease.

OBJECTIVES: Impairments of metacognitive skills represent a critical symptom in Alzheimer Disease (AD) because it frequently results in a lack of self-awareness. However, recent findings suggest that, despite an inability to explicitly estimate their own cognitive functioning, patients might demonstrate some implicit recognition of difficulties. In this study, we tested whether a behavioral dissociation between explicit and implicit measures of metacognition can be found in both healthy older controls (n = 20) and AD patients (n = 20). METHODS: Our two groups of participants (AD vs. Controls) were asked to complete a forced-choice perceptual identification test and to explicitly rate their confidence in each decision (i.e. explicit measure of metacognition). Moreover, they also had the opportunity to ask for a cue to help them decide if their response was correct (i.e. implicit measure of metacognition). RESULTS: Data revealed that all participants asked for a cue more often after an incorrect response than after a correct response in the forced-choice identification test, indicating a good ability to implicitly introspect on the results of their cognitive operations. On the contrary, only healthy participants displayed metacognitive sensitivity when making explicit confidence judgments. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that implicit metacognition may be less affected than explicit metacognition in Alzheimer's disease.

Too Much Familiarity! The Developmental Path of the Fluency Heuristic in Children.

We tested whether changes in attribution processes could account for the developmental differences observed in how children's use fluency to guide their memory decisions. Children ranging in age from 4 to 9 years studied a list of familiar or unfamiliar cartoon characters. In Experiment 1 (n = 84), participants completed a recognition test during which the perceptual fluency of some items was enhanced using a prime. In Experiment 2 (n = 96), participants completed a source recollection judgment on their recognition decisions. Primed items were recognized at a higher rate than unprimed items. However, while young children rely on fluency for all items, older children use fluency only for unfamiliar items. This pattern came together with a reduction in familiarity-based-but not recollection-based-memory responses.

Strategies to resolve recall failures for proper names: New data.

Personal names are particularly susceptible to retrieval failures. Studies describing people's spontaneous strategies for resolving such failures have indicated that people frequently search for semantic or contextual information about the target person. However, previous experimental studies have shown that, while providing phonological information may help resolve a name-recall failure, by contrast, providing semantic information is usually not helpful. In the first study, in order to reduce a bias present in previous studies of spontaneous strategies, explicit instructions were given to participants, specifying that the focus of the study was on a voluntary search for information. Participants reported strategically searching for semantic/contextual strategies when they tried to resolve a name-retrieval failure more often than they reported searching for phonological/orthographic information. In addition, phonological/orthographic strategies were perceived as more difficult than semantic/contextual strategies. In a second experiment, we investigated whether retrieving phonological information by oneself is objectively difficult in a face-naming task: in the event of retrieval failure, participants were instructed to search for phonological information in some trials and for semantic information in other trials. Participants recalled semantic information in 94% of the trials when instructed to search for semantic information. By contrast, when instructed to search for phonological information, participants remained unable to recall any correct piece of phonological information in about 55% of the trials. This result shows that the retrieval of phonological information is objectively difficult. This difficulty could explain why people do not privilege searching for phonology to resolve name-retrieval failures.

Interactions with the integrative memory model.

The integrative memory model formalizes a new conceptualization of memory in which interactions between representations and cognitive operations within large-scale cerebral networks generate subjective memory feelings. Such interactions allow to explain the complexity of memory expressions, such as the existence of multiples sources for familiarity and recollection feelings and the fact that expectations determine how one recognizes previously encountered information.

Hunting down the source: How amnesic patients avoid fluency-based memory errors.

OBJECTIVE: The primary aim of this study was to test whether differences in the ability of amnesic and healthy participants to detect alternative sources of fluency can account for differences observed in the use of fluency as a cue for memory. METHOD: Patients with severe memory deficits and matched controls were presented with 3 forced-choice recognition tests. In each test, an external source of fluency was provided by manipulating the perceptual quality of the studied items during the test phase. The detectability of the perceptual manipulation varied in each test (i.e., a 10%, 20%, or 30% contrast reductions were given). RESULTS: The results indicated that all participants were able to rely on fluency when making recognition decisions as long as the perceptual manipulation remained unnoticed. It is interesting that our data also revealed that the level of contrast reduction at which the alternative source is detected differs between healthy controls and amnesic patients. Specifically, patients with amnesia appeared to disqualify fluency as a cue for memory even when the contrast reduction was moderate, whereas healthy participants disqualified fluency only when the contrast reduction was clearly visible. CONCLUSION: Overall, our results seem to suggest that the ability to use fluency is probably not impaired in amnesia but undergoes metacognitive changes resulting in the implementation of explicit or implicit strategies aiming at tracking alternative sources in order to reduce memory errors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Neonatal Cancer Epidemiology and Outcome: A Retrospective Study.

OBJECTIVE: Our study aimed at describing neonatal cancer incidence, distribution by type, location, outcome, and long-term toxicity, by comparison with tumors occurring later in infancy. METHODS: The authors led a single-center retrospective analysis of 118 cases of tumors diagnosed in the first year of life and compared tumors' types incidence, presentation, location, and outcome according to age group at diagnosis (below or over 28 d of life). RESULTS: The most frequent neonatal tumor types in our series were germ cell tumors, mainly teratoma, followed by neuroblastoma and renal tumors, whereas in children below 1 year of age, brain tumors, neuroblastoma, and leukemia were the most common types. Genetic predisposition syndromes were present in 14% of these infants and antenatal sonography enabled 68% of diagnosis for tumors presenting at birth. Other patients presented with mass syndrome, hydrops, or skin lesions. Six percent of neonates with cancer died from their malignancies, and up to 18% experienced a chronic health condition as a consequence of therapy. CONCLUSIONS: Tumor pattern differs in neonates and infants, with a higher percentage of benign tumors in children below 28 days of life. Yet, long-term therapy-related toxicity is significant in younger patients. Enhancing knowledge of neonatal tumors, their epidemiology, clinical presentation, genetic background, and prognosis should help promote better management and introduce follow-up programs to improve surviving rates and the quality of life of survivors.

Fluency-based memory decisions in Alzheimer's disease: A matter of source detection?

OBJECTIVE: The primary aim of this study was to test whether differences in the ability of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy participants to detect alternative sources of fluency can account for differences observed in the use of fluency-that is, the ease with which information is processed-as a cue for memory. METHOD: Twenty-two patients with AD and 22 matched controls were presented with three forced-choice visual recognition tests. In each test, an external source of fluency was provided by manipulating the perceptual quality of the items during the test phase. The detectability of the perceptual manipulation varied in each test (i.e., 10%, 20%, or 30% contrast reduction were given). RESULTS: Data indicated that AD patients rely on fluency in a similar extent than older adults as long as they demonstrate intact detection of differences in the perceptual quality of the items. Specifically, it appears that patients' ability to visually discriminate stimuli differing in terms of their perceptual quality is critical for patients to be able to implement strategies to appropriately use or correctly disqualify fluency during a recognition task. CONCLUSION: Overall, these findings suggest that the disruption of some basic cognitive processes could prevent AD patients to experience fluency in a similar extent than healthy controls. However, when the ability to detect differences in the perceptual quality of the stimuli was taken into account, patients appeared to be as able as controls to rely on fluency to guide their memory decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).