Imagining what might be: Why children underestimate uncertainty

Beck, Sarah R.; McColgan, Kerry L.; Robinson, Elizabeth; Rowley, Martin

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2011.06.010

Cited by 23 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Table 2 demonstrates children's guessing preferences both when they picked a pen and drew the circle, and when these were done by the experimenter. Unlike the adult data, there was no difference in guessing preferences according to who controlled the outcome, In line with the findings reported in Beck et al (2010) and Robinson et al (2009;also, McColgan et al, 2010), children preferred to guess under conditions of epistemic rather than physical uncertainty, and this effect was no different whether the child themselves, or the experimenter, picked the pen and drew the circle.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 84%

“…The present results, together with the data of Beck et al (2010), thus suggest that the imagination account is a better explanation of children's responses to uncertainty than the competence hypothesis. Aside from the imagination account, there may also be developmental and social reasons for children not being sensitive to feelings of relative (in)competence.…”

Section: Implications For Children's Handling Of Uncertaintysupporting

confidence: 64%

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Agency Affects Adults', but not Children's, Guessing Preferences in a Game of Chance

Harris

Rowley

Beck

et al. 2011

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Adults and children have recently been shown to prefer guessing the outcome of a die roll after the die has been rolled (but remained out of sight) rather than before it has been rolled. This result is contrary to the predictions of the competence hypothesis (Heath & Tversky, 1991), which proposes that people are sensitive to the degree of their relative ignorance and therefore prefer to guess about an outcome it is impossible to know, rather than one that they could know, but do not. We investigated the potential role of agency in guessing preferences about a novel game of chance. When the experimenter controlled the outcome, we replicated the finding that adults and 5- to 6-year-old children preferred to make their guess after the outcome had been determined. For adults only, this preference reversed when they exerted control over the outcome about which they were guessing. The adult data appear best explained by a modified version of the competence hypothesis that highlights the notion of control or responsibility. It is proposed that potential attributions of blame are related to the guesser's role in determining the outcome. The child data were consistent with an imagination-based account of guessing preferences.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 84%

Section: Implications For Children's Handling Of Uncertaintysupporting

confidence: 64%

Agency Affects Adults', but not Children's, Guessing Preferences in a Game of Chance

Harris

Rowley

Beck

et al. 2011

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…Lueddeke & Higham, 2011), development (e.g. Beck, McColgan, Robinson & Rowley, 2011), cognitive differences between species (e.g. Smith, Beran, Couchman, Coutinho & Boomer, 2009), social interaction (e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Measures of metacognition on signal-detection theoretic models.

Barrett

Dienes

Seth

2013

Psychological Methods

157

209

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Analysing metacognition, specifically knowledge of accuracy of internal perceptual, memorial or other knowledge states, is vital for many strands of psychology, including determining the accuracy of feelings of knowing, and discriminating conscious from unconscious cognition. Quantifying metacognitive sensitivity is however more challenging than quantifying basic stimulus sensitivity. Under popular signal detection theory (SDT) models for stimulus classification tasks, approaches based on type II receiver-operator Keywords: metacognition; signal-detection theory; modeling; meta-d ′ ; confidence; discrimination 3 Metacognition, and in particular the ability to assess the accuracy of knowledge states, is fundamental to understanding executive processes (e.g. Koriat, 2007) that G is sensitive to bias (i.e. a priori disposition to respond in one way or another), and thus not ideal. They recommended a signal detection approach instead. Here we will pursue the use of signal detection theory (SDT) to determine the suitability of the different signal detection measures of association available for assessing metacognition.SDT has been a major innovation in psychology and neuroscience, proving extremely useful for measuring stimulus discrimination accuracy independently of response bias (Lau & Passingham, 2006;Lau, 2008;Macmillan & Creelman, 2005). In a typical stimulus discrimination study subjects encounter many trials, in each of which they make a forced-choice response, classifying a stimulus as either present versus absent, or as 'type A' versus 'type B'. SDT posits that the discrimination decision on this so-called 'type I' task is based on internally generated evidence that follows distinct Gaussian probability distributions in the respective scenarios of 'absent' and 'present' (see 4 Figure 1 and e.g. Macmillan & Creelman, 2005). The fundamental SDT measure of discrimination performance, 'type I d-prime', is defined theoretically as the difference between the means divided by the standard deviation of the 'absent' distribution. 1 SDT further assumes a decision threshold (or criterion) determining whether the subject responds 'absent' or 'present', allowing each trial to be classified as a hit, miss, false alarm, or correct rejection. On this model, type I d-prime is by definition independent of this decision threshold and is therefore insensitive to response bias.Given the success of SDT in measuring type I stimulus discrimination, there has been a natural motivation to apply it also to the so-called type II, or metacognitive, task We first consider 'type II d-prime', which is computed from type II hit and false alarm rates using the directly analogous formula to type I d-prime (a type II hit [false An alternative to type II d-prime that has received some support (Kolb & Braun, 1995;Wilimzig, Tsuchiya, Fahle, Einhuser, & Koch, 2008;Clifford, Arabzadeh & Harris, 2008;Masson & Rotello, 2009) is the use of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves to assess type II behaviour. A type I ROC curve charact...

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“…Metacognition, and in particular the ability to assess the accuracy of knowledge states, is fundamental to understanding executive processes (e.g., Koriat, 2007 ), the nature of memory (e.g., Mazzoni, Scoboria, & Harvey, 2010 ), good educational practice (e.g., Koriat, 2012 ), gambling ( Lueddeke & Higham, 2011 ), development ( Beck, McColgan, Robinson, & Rowley, 2011 ), cognitive differences between species ( Smith, Beran, Couchman, Coutinho, & Boomer, 2009 ), social interaction ( Frith, 2012 ), mental illness ( Hamm et al, 2012 ), and the distinction between conscious and unconscious processes in both perception ( Kanai, Walsh, & Tseng, 2010 ) and learning ( Dienes & Seth, 2010 ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Blind Insight: Metacognitive Discrimination Despite Chance Task Performance

Scott¹,

Dienes²,

Barrett

et al. 2014

Psychol Sci

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Blindsight and other examples of unconscious knowledge and perception demonstrate dissociations between judgment accuracy and metacognition: Studies reveal that participants’ judgment accuracy can be above chance while their confidence ratings fail to discriminate right from wrong answers. Here, we demonstrated the opposite dissociation: a reliable relationship between confidence and judgment accuracy (demonstrating metacognition) despite judgment accuracy being no better than chance. We evaluated the judgments of 450 participants who completed an AGL task. For each trial, participants decided whether a stimulus conformed to a given set of rules and rated their confidence in that judgment. We identified participants who performed at chance on the discrimination task, utilizing a subset of their responses, and then assessed the accuracy and the confidence-accuracy relationship of their remaining responses. Analyses revealed above-chance metacognition among participants who did not exhibit decision accuracy. This important new phenomenon, which we term blind insight, poses critical challenges to prevailing models of metacognition grounded in signal detection theory.

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Imagining what might be: Why children underestimate uncertainty

Cited by 23 publications

References 25 publications

Agency Affects Adults', but not Children's, Guessing Preferences in a Game of Chance

Agency Affects Adults', but not Children's, Guessing Preferences in a Game of Chance

Measures of metacognition on signal-detection theoretic models.

Blind Insight: Metacognitive Discrimination Despite Chance Task Performance

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