Anne-Marie Melot

Theory of mind: is training contagious?

In this study, preschool children were successfully trained in theory of mind tasks, namely false belief inference and appearance–reality distinction. Results show that both types of training had a direct effect, as measured by the improvement of performance on the FB and AR delayed post-tests. Both types of training also had an indirect effect, as measured by transfer of the benefits of the training to the task that was not in the training. Finally, both types of training were effective even when the children were trained in a task they had already mastered.

The relationship between metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences: Acquisition and re-elaboration

Six- to nine-year-old children participated in a training experiment concerning study and recall of categorized items. Explicit feedback given during training sessions was devoted to emphasize the relationship between strategy use and recall performance. Verbal descriptions of the contents of these training sessions were asked before a delayed post-test, given two weeks later.It appears from the results that: (1) The degree of understanding of the information provided by training with explicit feedback, as indicated by subjects’ verbal descriptions, is a good predictor of strategy maintenance on the post-test. Explicit feedback provides subjects with information about the relationship between procedures and results. However, only those subjects who were able to re-elaborate this information were able to construct more permanent metacognitive knowledge; (2) Such a form of cognitive re-elaboration appears to be necessary for acquired metacognitive knowledge to have a regulatory effect on subsequent behavior; and (3) The level of a subject’s prior metacognitive knowledge seems to be one of the determinants in the ability to efficiently integrate new metacognitive knowledge by re-elaboration of metacognitive experiences.RésuméQuatre-vingt-dix enfants âgés de six à neuf ans ont participé à une expérience d’entraînement concernant l’étude et le rappel d’items catégorisables. Au cours des sessions d’entraînement, les sujets reçoivent un feed-back explicite dont la fonction est de mettre en évidence l’importance de la relation entre utilisation d’une stratégie de mémorisation et performance de rappel. Deux semaines après l’entraînement, les sujets sont soumis à un post-test précédé, pour certains d’entre eux, d’une demande de description des sessions d’entraînement.Les résultats montrent que: 1) Le degré de compréhension de l’information qu’apportent l’entraînement et le feed-back, tel qu’en témoignent les verbalisations des sujets, est un excellent prédicteur du maintien de la stratégie lors du post-test. Le feed-back explicite donne à tous les sujets une information concernant la liaison entre procédures et résultats. Cependant, seuls les sujets qui ré-élaborent cette information sont en mesure de construire un savoir métacognitif plus permanent en termes de liaison entre but et moyens; 2) Une telle forme de ré-élaboration cognitive semble être nécessaire pour que le savoir métacognitif acquis exerce un effet régulateur sur les conduites ultérieures; et, 3) Le niveau de savoir métacognitif préalable à l’entraînement semble déterminant dans la capacité des sujets à acquérir un nouveau savoir métacognitif par la ré-élaboration des expériences métacognitives.

Organization of metacognitive knowledge: A condition for strategy use in memorization

In this research, we study acquisition and maintenance of a categorization strategy for item recall. 56 children, aged 6 to 8 years, who do not spontaneously use such a strategy during a pretest are given a training session with feed-back. The experimental procedure involves asking subjects before the post-test to give a description of the training session: this description may be considered as reflecting the representation of the relation between strategy use and recall performance (i.e. the metacognitive knowledge), as it is available at the time of the post-test phase. Our results clarify the conditions under which metacognitive knowledge about the relations between goals, strategies and acquired performance can be re-used in the solution of different but analogous tasks. Thus, only those subjects who can use information provided during training to construct metacognitive knowledge that is both generalizable, and refers to functional relations between means and ends, are able to re-use the acquired strategy. We believe that the construction of such forms of metacognitive knowledge implies two distinct processes of cognitive reorganization. However the question of what distinguishes subjects who can successfully proceed with this cognitive reorganization from others remains open.