The Development of Metacognitive Competences

Abstract

One damn thing leads to another. I forget to open the garage door this morning, back my car into the door, and splinter it. The actions we perform cause other events - my backing up causes the splintering. But events of other linds - nonactions - have their effects, too. With no help from me, last night's storm caused a branch to fall from a tree, putting a hole in my roof, Much as we might like to forget them, we often keep track of events like these and the causes that unite them. Although we might not have predicted these events, we can remember and reconstruct part of the causal sequences after they occur. In retelling the events of last summer, for example, we tend to relate the events in forward causal order, starting, say, at the beginning of our trip to Virginia in May and proceeding chronologically. If we want to mention other linds of events from the same period, such as our summer work experiences, we may start again at the beginning of the summer, moving along the events in a parallel causal stream (Barsalou 1988). We also remember fictional stories in terms of the causal changes that compose their main plot line, remembering less about events falling on deadend side plots (Trabasso and Sperry 1985). We sometimes attribute causal powers to concrete objects as well as to events, but we can understand this sort of tallc as an abbreviation for event causation. If Fred caused the glass to break that's because one of Fred's actions -maybe his dropping it - caused the breaking. I'll take event causation as basic in this article on the strength of such paraphrases. We remember causes and effects for event types as well as for event tokens. Ramming heavy objects into more fragile ones typically causes the fragile items damage; repeating phone numbers four or five times typically causes us to remember them for awhile. Negotiating routine events (e.g., Schanlc and Abelson 1977), constructing explanations (e.g., Lewis 19861, and maling predictions all require memory for causal relations among event categories. Causal generalities underlie our concepts of natural linds, like daisies and diamonds (e.g., Ahn and Kim 2000; Barton and Komatsu 1989; Gelman and Wellman 1991; Keil 1989; Rehder and Hastie 2001; Rips 1989, 2001) and support our concepts of artifacts like pianos or prisms. Our lnowledge of how beliefs and desires cause actions in other people props up our own social activities (e.g., Wellman 1990).