The realism in children's metacognitive judgments of their episodic memory performance

Abstract

This chapter deals with the metacognitive realism in children's confidence judgments of the correctness of their own episodic memory recall. The chapter first provides some observations on metacognition, the realism in metacognition and its measurement. Next, the chapter focuses on some factors that can influence the realism in confidence judgments of the correctness of one's episodic recall. These factors include the experienced event, the individual's general level of reported confidence, intermediate events (such as communication with others), the social situation in which memories are reported, the memory question asked (e.g., type of question: open free recall, directed questions, etc.), the measurement scale used, and the analysed aspect of the realism in confidence (e.g., calibration or discrimination). Two studies by the present author and his co-workers are then presented more in detail in order to deepen the analysis of some of the factors envisaged. The last study shows that, given the appropriate conditions (e.g., open free recall), children can, in similarity to adults, show more or less perfect realism in their confidence ratings of their memory reports. The chapter also more generally relates the level of realism in children's confidence judgments to that of adults'. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.