Babies Are Able To Communicate Their Uncertainty Before They Are Verbal, Study Finds
Contrary to previous findings, a new study conducted by researchers in France has found that infants know when they don't know something and are able to let others know even before they learn how to talk. This means that humans are, in fact, metacognitive at a much earlier age than was previously thought.
Though metacognition has been observed in other species, humans are the only ones that are able to communicate what they know - and what they don't. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) suggests that this is an ability that humans develop from a very early age. According to the study, which was conducted by Louise Goupil, Margaux Romand-Monnier, and Sid Kouider at Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, even babies as young as twenty months are able to gauge their own knowledge of the location of a toy and are able to ask for help when they are unsure.
In the study, titled "Infants Ask For Help When They Know They Don't Know," the authors proposed that "explicit metacognition develops earlier than previously thought, enabling infants to communicate their own uncertainty nonverbally to gain knowledge from others."
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The researchers used a nonverbal memory-monitoring paradigm to prove their hypothesis and found that infants are able to avoid making mistakes by strategically communicating their need for assistance. The new findings contradict earlier studies suggesting that preschoolers are not good at metacognition.
According to Goupil, the results from these early studies may have had more to do with how the experiments were conducted than with the infants' actual abilities. Speaking to The Atlantic, Goupil suggested that the tasks could have been too difficult and the participants "couldn't report if they were sure or unsure because they were just confused all the time."
"And maybe they're bad at talking about their own mental states, but can reflect on their own competencies and knowledge if you ask them to do so non-verbally," she said.
This is why in their own study, Louise and her colleagues set up an experiment in which the infants' metacognition was tested without forcing them to talk about it.
However, as Ars Technica pointed out, the issue with the experiment is that the participants were taught that they could turn to their parents for help, possibly eliminating the opportunity to know if they would do so spontaneously.
