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Young Children Spontaneously Devise an Optimal External Solution to a Cognitive Problem

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Title: Young Children Spontaneously Devise an Optimal External Solution to a Cognitive Problem
Language: English
Authors: Armitage, Kristy L. (ORCID 0000-0002-1898-8622), Taylor, Alex H. (ORCID 0000-0003-3492-7667), Suddendorf, Thomas (ORCID 0000-0003-3328-7442), Redshaw, Jonathan (ORCID 0000-0002-7729-1577)
Source: Developmental Science. May 2022 25(3).
Availability: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 9
Publication Date: 2022
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Descriptors: Problem Solving, Metacognition, Preschool Children, Task Analysis, Learning Strategies
DOI: 10.1111/desc.13204
ISSN: 1467-7687
Abstract: Metacognition plays an essential role in adults' cognitive offloading decisions. Despite possessing basic metacognitive capacities, however, preschool-aged children often fail to offload effectively. Here, we introduced 3- to 5-year-olds to a novel search task in which they were unlikely to perform optimally across trials without setting external reminders about the location of a target. Children watched as an experimenter first hid a target in one of three identical opaque containers. The containers were then shuffled out of view before children had to guess where the target was hidden. In the test phase, children could perform perfectly by simply placing a marker in a transparent jar attached to the target container prior to shuffling, and then later selecting the marked container. Children of all ages used this external strategy above chance levels if they had seen it demonstrated to them, but only the 4- and 5-year-olds independently devised the strategy to improve their future performance. These results suggest that, when necessary for optimal performance, even 4- and 5-year-olds can use metacognitive knowledge about their own future uncertainty to deploy effective external solutions.
Abstractor: As Provided
Notes: https://osf.io/ryxa9
Entry Date: 2022
Accession Number: EJ1336777
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0156322669;5g501may.22;2022Jun17.13:07;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0156322669-1">Young children spontaneously devise an optimal external solution to a cognitive problem </title> <p>Metacognition plays an essential role in adults' cognitive offloading decisions. Despite possessing basic metacognitive capacities, however, preschool‐aged children often fail to offload effectively. Here, we introduced 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds to a novel search task in which they were unlikely to perform optimally across trials without setting external reminders about the location of a target. Children watched as an experimenter first hid a target in one of three identical opaque containers. The containers were then shuffled out of view before children had to guess where the target was hidden. In the test phase, children could perform perfectly by simply placing a marker in a transparent jar attached to the target container prior to shuffling, and then later selecting the marked container. Children of all ages used this external strategy above chance levels if they had seen it demonstrated to them, but only the 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds independently devised the strategy to improve their future performance. These results suggest that, when necessary for optimal performance, even 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds can use metacognitive knowledge about their own future uncertainty to deploy effective external solutions.</p> <p>Keywords: cognitive development; cognitive offloading; metacognition; problem solving; reminder setting</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-2">INTRODUCTION</hd> <p>In the ancient gambling game known as "the shell game," a player attempts to keep track of a container concealing a reward as it is quickly shuffled amongst identical containers that are empty. Assuming no sleight of hand, the game would become trivially easy if the player were able to set reminders about the location of the hidden reward—for example, by marking the baited container before the shuffling begins. Actions that serve to eliminate or alleviate internal demand in this manner are referred to as <emph>cognitive offloading</emph> (Risko & Gilbert, 2016).</p> <p>In our everyday lives, we frequently use cognitive offloading to prevent prospective memory failures (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Einstein & McDaniel, 1990; Gilbert, 2015a; Risko & Gilbert, 2016). Forgetting to turn off the oven, attend an important meeting, or take medication at a specific time of day, for example, can have disastrous consequences (Einstein & McDaniel, 1996). To avoid such consequences, we set reminders by writing notes on our hands or in calendars, leaving items in conspicuous locations, and more recently, creating future notifications on smartphones or other wearable technologies (Finley et al., 2018; Grinschgl et al., 2020; Svoboda et al., 2012). Adults typically set more reminders as the number of to‐be‐remembered tasks increases (Gilbert, 2015a). In other words, we offload cognition <emph>selectively</emph>, relying on internal processes where adequate but turning to external support in situations of heightened internal demand (Armitage et al., 2020). Such decisions are often underpinned by metacognitive evaluations of our own cognitive limits (Gilbert et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2019; Risko & Gilbert, 2016). Indeed, offloading is more frequent when adults <emph>believe</emph> they are unable to complete the task unaided, even when these beliefs are inaccurate (Dunn & Risko, 2016; Gilbert, 2015b).</p> <p>Remembering to perform certain tasks in the future is also critical for young children's daily functioning (Beal, 1985; Mahy et al., 2014a). For example, they may need to remember to deliver messages, bring home permission slips, return books to the library, or complete homework by a particular day (Kvavilashvili et al., 2008). From as early as 2 years of age, children begin to pass basic prospective memory tasks, with performance improving throughout childhood and adolescence (e.g., Kliegel et al., 2013; Kvavilashvili et al., 2001; Mackinlay et al., 2009; Mahy & Moses, 2011; Mahy et al., 2014a, 2014b; Redshaw et al., 2016; Somerville et al., 1983).</p> <p>Young children also demonstrate a capacity to offload future memory demands when given instruction to do so. In one study, children aged 5 years and older stored stickers in distinctive locations to facilitate future retrieval after receiving a prompt to offload in this manner, whereas 3‐year‐old children did not (Heisel & Ritter, 1981). In another study, even 4‐year‐olds showed a capacity to set external reminders of an object's hiding location when introduced to this strategy by an experimenter (Bulley, McCarthy, et al., 2020). Young children apparently struggle, however, to independently devise and implement their own offloading techniques to improve their likelihood of remembering in the future. In Bulley, McCarthy, et al.'s (2020) second experiment, children were provided with an opportunity to spontaneously devise a reminder setting strategy to facilitate recall of up to five hidden targets among 25 possible locations. None of the 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds but almost all of the 10‐ and 11‐year‐olds devised their own strategy using an external marker (Bulley, McCarthy, et al., 2020).</p> <p>The lack of spontaneous cognitive offloading in 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children is somewhat surprising, given that they appear to possess basic metacognitive insight into their own cognitive limits (Roebers, 2014; Schraw & Moshman, 1995; Sodian et al., 2012). For instance, children of this age ask for help when uncertain about the answer to a cognitive problem (Beran et al., 2012), and seem to understand when they are ignorant about the location of a hidden object (Neldner et al., 2015) or when they have forgotten information in a memory task (Balcomb & Gerken, 2008). Yet, it is also well‐established that young children are often overconfident in their predictions about their mental abilities, even after receiving feedback or experiencing failures (Lipko et al., 2009; Shin et al., 2007). Such overconfidence might prevent them from detecting when their cognitive performance would be likely to benefit from devising an offloading strategy. Indeed, the 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds in Bulley, McCarthy, et al. (2020) may have failed to spontaneously offload memory demands simply because it was possible (although difficult) to recall the location of five hidden targets by relying on unaided memory alone. In other words, the very availability of an internal strategy may have led these children to be over‐confident in their internal memory ability and precluded them from considering external solutions.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-3">RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS</hd> <p></p> <ulist> <item> We developed a novel "memory" task that cannot be solved internally, such that participants have to guess between options unless they set external reminders.</item> <p></p> <item> Children aged 3, 4, and 5 years used an effective reminder setting strategy if they had seen it demonstrated to them.</item> <p></p> <item> Only 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children were able to spontaneously devise the effective reminder setting strategy themselves to improve their future performance.</item> <p></p> <item> When necessary for optimal performance, even 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children can translate metacognitive knowledge about their future uncertainty into effective compensatory behaviors.</item> </ulist> <p>Furthermore, even if young children accurately recognize a situation where their internal cognitive abilities are likely to fail, they may lack the requisite capacity to transfer this metacognitive knowledge into effective control over behavior. Indeed, a developmental lag between metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive control is well‐established (Destan et al., 2014; Dufresne & Kobasigawa, 1989; Lockl & Schneider, 2004; Redshaw et al., 2018; Schraw & Moshman, 1995). In one study, for example, 5‐ to 7‐year‐old children were shown to‐be‐remembered items of varying difficulty and were given the opportunity to study these items before completing a recall test (Destan et al., 2014). Although children of all ages predicted that they would accurately recall more easy than difficult items, only the 6‐ and 7‐year‐old children spent longer studying the items that they believed they would forget. Thus, even if the young children in Bulley, McCarthy, et al. (2020) were aware that their internal memory might fail, they may have been unlikely to consider possible behavioral strategies aimed at preventing such failures.</p> <p>Here, we aimed to increase children's motivation to use an external solution to a cognitive problem by maximizing the difference in efficacy between internal and external solutions—such that children would be forced to guess between options unless they adopted an effective external solution. We also sought to increase children's motivation to transfer metacognitive knowledge about their cognitive limits into metacognitive control over their behavior, by implementing a choice‐based measure where the effective solution was one of three different possibilities. Our task resembled the shell game, where a reward was hidden in one of three identical containers. In this case, however, the containers were shuffled out of the children's sight, preventing them from visually tracking the location of the reward. Instead, children were shown how to externally mark the containers prior to shuffling, to help them retrieve the reward after shuffling. Some children were taught the most effective external strategy (marking the rewarded container) and were able to simply copy this strategy to perform optimally across trials. Other children, however, were taught a less effective external strategy (marking an unrewarded container). These children could only optimize their performance by (i) recognizing that the demonstrated external strategy was suboptimal; and (ii) spontaneously devising the most effective external strategy themselves.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-4">METHOD</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0156322669-5">Subjects</hd> <p>The study was preregistered on the Open Science Framework before commencing data collection (https://osf.io/ryxa9/). Thirty‐two 3‐year‐olds (M = 3.53 years, <emph>SD</emph> = 0.26), 32 4‐year‐olds (M = 4.54, <emph>SD</emph> = 0.26) and 32 5‐year‐olds (M = 5.45, <emph>SD</emph> = 0.30) participated, resulting in a final sample of 96 children (48 males, 48 females) aged between 3.02 and 5.98 years (M = 4.50, <emph>SD</emph> = 0.83). This sample size is similar to sample sizes used in various studies of children's cognitive offloading (Armitage & Redshaw, 2021; Bulley, McCarthy, et al., 2020). An additional 27 children were excluded due to either passing fewer than four of the six training trials (<emph>n</emph> = 13, with 12 of these children aged 3 years), experimenter error (<emph>n</emph> = 8), not providing a birthdate (<emph>n</emph> = 2), being outside the desired age range (<emph>n</emph> = 2), or peeking either during the shuffling process or at the numbers printed on the back of the containers for counterbalancing purposes (<emph>n</emph> = 2). Caregivers provided informed consent before testing commenced.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-6">Design and procedure</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0156322669-7">Experience phase</hd> <p>Children first completed six trials of the task without the opportunity to set reminders (see Phase 1 in Figure 1). The experimenter placed three identical opaque containers, each attached to a smaller transparent jar, on the ground between themselves and the child. Children were verbally instructed that the experimenter would "place a sticker into one of the containers, put all the lids on, and then hide the containers." They were then told that while the containers were hidden, the experimenter would "shuffle them all around, and then you have to guess where the sticker is gone." On each trial, the experimenter removed the container lids, dropped a sticker into one container and returned the lids, such that the sticker was no longer visible. The containers were then concealed from the child behind a screen and shuffled into one of six possible orders (where one matched the starting position of the containers, such that the sticker was found in the same location as it was hidden). Across the six trials, all six possible orders for the final position of containers were used, with the stickers being hidden twice in each container and found twice in each final position (see Supplementary Note 1 for detailed counterbalancing information). Next, children were shown the newly arranged containers and were asked "Can you guess where the sticker is?" As they had no indication of where the sticker was hidden, children had to simply guess between the three options.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/5G5/01may22/desc13204-fig-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNHX8kSepq84v%2bvlOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="desc13204-fig-0001.jpg" title="1 A representation of all three phases of the task, where each phase was itself comprised of three steps. All children completed the same versions of phase 1 and phase 3, but they were pseudorandomly allocated to either the target‐marked training or empty‐marked training condition for phase 2. The experimenter's actions are represented in red, and the child's actions in blue. In each phase, the experimenter always hid the stickers (denoted by yellow stars) and shuffled the containers behind a screen (denoted by the black bars), and in phase 2 the experimenter also placed the markers (denoted by green circles). In phase 3, the child placed their own markers (here, the bolded blue arrow indicates where the child should place their marker in order to optimise performance). In each phase, the blue asterisks above the containers in step 3 represent where the child should search for the sticker if they understand the task. Note that the actual target hiding locations and shuffled container locations were counterbalanced across children and trials" /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0156322669-9">Training phase</hd> <p>In the second phase, children completed six trials of the task in one of two training conditions (eight males and eight females of each age group in each condition). This phase followed the same procedure as phase 1, except that, prior to shuffling, the experimenter dropped a marker into one of the transparent jars (see Phase 2 in Figure 1). The experimenter explained the task to children while demonstrating, saying "Now I'm going to make the game a little different. This time, I'm going to put a sticker into this container over here. But you see this marker? I'm going to put the marker into this jar here. Now I'll hide the containers from you and shuffle them all around (shuffling procedure commences). Can you guess where the sticker is?" In the target‐marked training condition, the experimenter dropped the marker into the jar attached to the rewarded container. The marker, therefore, indicated the <emph>presence</emph> of the sticker, so that after the containers were shuffled, children simply had to locate the marker and search in the attached container (i.e., for a 100% chance of success).</p> <p>In the empty‐marked training condition, however, the marker was placed in a jar attached to one of the two unrewarded containers. Here, the marker indicated the <emph>absence</emph> of the sticker, so that after the containers were shuffled, children had to locate the marker and then guess between the two unmarked containers (i.e., for a 50% chance of success; see Supplementary Table 1 for descriptive data on children's training performance). Children in this condition were therefore unlikely to be rewarded on every training trial, even when they understood that they should avoid searching the marked container. The training phase followed the same counterbalancing procedures as outlined in the experience phase, with the addition that across the six trials, each container was marked twice, and the marker was found twice in each final position.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-10">Test phase</hd> <p>Finally, children completed six trials of the test phase. At the beginning of each trial, children were handed a marker, and after the experimenter placed the sticker into a container, children were asked to place the marker in whatever jar they wanted. The experimenter would say "This time, I'm still going to hide the sticker for you, but you're going to put the marker into one of the jars." The experimenter then pointed to all the jars, and said "You could put it here, or here, or here. You can put the marker wherever you want. I'm going to put the sticker over here. Where are you going to put your marker?" Children were scored as having marked correctly if they placed the marker in the jar attached to the rewarded container. This meant that the children who were trained in the target‐marked condition could achieve a perfect score by simply copying the external solution demonstrated by the experimenter in the training phase. Children who were trained in the empty‐marked condition, by contrast, had to make an additional inference that they must mark the rewarded rather than unrewarded container in order to optimize their performance.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-11">RESULTS</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0156322669-12">Target marking: Individual level results</hd> <p>For an individual child to perform above chance level (33.33%), they needed to have marked the correct container on at least five of the six test trials (binomial test, <emph>p</emph> < 0.05). Within each training condition, at least three of the 16 children of each age group needed to reach this threshold in order for the age group itself to surpass chance performance. This is because the a priori likelihood of at least two out of 16 individual children passing above chance levels is 18.9% (<emph>p </emph>= 0.189), whereas the a priori likelihood of at least three out of 16 individual children passing above chance levels is 4.3% (<emph>p </emph>= 0.043).</p> <p>For the children trained in the target‐marked condition, 10 3‐year‐olds, nine 4‐year‐olds, and 12 5‐year‐olds marked the correct container on at least five of the six test trials, meaning that all age groups clearly performed above chance, all <emph>p</emph>s < 0.001 (see Supplementary Table 2 for descriptive data). By contrast, for the children trained in the empty‐marked condition, two 3‐year‐olds, six 4‐year‐olds, and seven 5‐year‐olds marked the correct container on at least five of the six test trials. Therefore, only the 4‐ and 5‐year‐old age groups met the threshold for above chance performance, <emph>p</emph>s < 0.001, whereas the 3‐year‐old age group did not, <emph>p</emph> = 0.189. A post‐hoc Bayesian binomial test was conducted to evaluate the strength of evidence supporting the null finding for these 3‐year‐olds trained in the empty‐marked condition. Using the default, non‐informative prior in the statistical program JASP (JASP Team, 2020), this test revealed anecdotal evidence in favor of the null hypothesis, BF<subs>01</subs> = 2.49 (see Lee & Wagenmakers, 2014 for Bayes factor interpretations).</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-13">Target marking: Trial level results</hd> <p>To substantiate the individual analyses, children's responses across all six trials were also analyzed using preregistered generalized estimating equations (GEEs) that accounted for covariance between each subject's responses, using the statistical program SAS 9.4. Children's marking accuracy was modeled as a function of age (linear), trial number (linear) and training condition (target‐marked vs. empty‐marked; see Supplementary Table 3 for model details). There was no significant age effect, <emph>χ</emph><sups>2</sups>(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>, _I_N_i_ = 96) = 3.55, <emph>p</emph> = 0.060, <emph>w</emph> = 0.19 (Cohen, 1992), but there was a significant effect of training condition <emph>χ</emph><sups>2</sups>(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref2">1</reflink>, _I_N_i_ = 96) = 8.87, <emph>p</emph> = 0.003, <emph>w</emph> = 0.30 (see Figure 2). A post‐hoc power analysis revealed that the power to detect an effect of this size (<emph>w</emph> = 0.30) in a sample of 96 participants, using the same alpha level (0.05) was 0.84. Follow up one‐sample <emph>t</emph>‐tests revealed that, although children marked correctly more frequently than expected by chance (i.e., two out of six trials) in both conditions, they were more likely to mark correctly when trained in in the target‐marked condition, <emph>t</emph>(<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref3">47</reflink>) = 6.98, <emph>p</emph> < 0.001 (M = 4.19, <emph>SD</emph> = 2.17), than in the empty‐marked condition, <emph>t</emph>(<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref4">47</reflink>) = 2.23, <emph>p</emph> = 0.030 (M = 2.77, <emph>SD</emph> = 2.39). The interaction between age and training condition was not significant, <emph>χ</emph><sups>2</sups>(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref5">1</reflink>, _I_N_i_ = 96) = 0.29, <emph>p</emph> = 0.590, <emph>w</emph> = 0.05, indicating no evidence that this effect of training condition on marking accuracy differed across ages.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/5G5/01may22/desc13204-fig-0002.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNHX8kSepq84v%2bvlOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="desc13204-fig-0002.jpg" title="2 Children's average marking accuracy across test trials for each age group, split according to training conditions. The thin dotted line represents chance level on each trial (33.33%) and the bold dotted line represents the significance threshold for above chance performance (56.25%)." /> </p> <p></p> <p>A significant main effect of trial was also detected, indicating that children were more likely to mark correctly as they progressed through the test trials, <emph>χ</emph><sups>2</sups>(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref6">1</reflink>, _I_N_i_ = 96) = 20.50, <emph>p</emph> < 0.001, <emph>w</emph> = 0.46. As seen in Figure 2, the 5‐year‐old children trained in the target‐marked condition marked the correct container significantly more frequently than expected by chance from trial 1, and the 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds did so from trial 3, with all age groups improving as the trials progressed. When trained in the empty‐marked condition, however, performance across all age groups was comparatively lower. The 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds performed significantly above chance from trial 5, whereas the 3‐year‐olds did not perform significantly above chance on any test trial. Post‐hoc Bayesian binomial tests using the default, non‐informative prior were again used to evaluate the strength of evidence supporting these null findings (JASP Team, 2020). Three‐year‐old children's average marking accuracy on each trial in the empty‐marked condition was compared to chance level (33.33%), consistently revealing anecdotal to substantial evidence in favor of the null hypothesis (BF<subs>01</subs> values ranged from 1.88 to 3.55 across all trials). In Supplementary Table 4, we have included the frequentist and Bayesian binomial tests for each age group's performance on each trial in each condition.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-15">Target marking: Patterns across trials</hd> <p>Compared to the target‐marked condition, many more 3‐year‐olds trained in the empty‐marked condition either did not mark correctly on any trial or regressed to marking incorrectly after making at least one correct response (see Figure 3). Post‐hoc point‐biserial correlations revealed that, in the empty‐marked condition, children were significantly less likely to regress to the incorrect response with increasing age, <emph>r<subs>pb</subs></emph>(<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref7">46</reflink>) = ‐0.336, <emph>p</emph> = 0.019 (compare yellow segments in Figure 3, right panel), and significantly <emph>more</emph> likely to devise and sustain the optimal marking behaviour with increasing age, <emph>r<subs>pb</subs></emph>(<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref8">46</reflink>) = 0.343, <emph>p</emph> = 0.017 (compare blue and green segments in Figure 3, right panel; and note that these results remained significant even when excluding the children represented by the patterned green segments). Neither of these age effects were detected in the target‐marked condition, <emph>p</emph>s > 0.491 (see Figure 3, left panel).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/5G5/01may22/desc13204-fig-0003.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNHX8kSepq84v%2bvlOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="desc13204-fig-0003.jpg" title="3 Grouping of children by age group according to when they marked the rewarded container across the six trials. Blue segments represent children who marked the rewarded container on the first trial and all subsequent trials. Green segments represent children who marked an unrewarded container on the first trial, but eventually marked the rewarded container and sustained that response across subsequent trials. The patterned green segments represent the few children who only marked correctly on the sixth and final trial. Yellow segments represent children who marked the rewarded container on at least one trial but subsequently regressed to marking an unrewarded container on at least one trial. Red segments represent children who did not mark the rewarded container on any trial." /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0156322669-17">Relationship between target marking and searching</hd> <p>An exploratory analysis confirmed that marking correctly increased the likelihood of searching in the correct container and retrieving the sticker, <emph>χ</emph><sups>2</sups>(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref9">1</reflink>, _I_N_i_ = 96) = 66.32, <emph>p</emph> < 0.001, <emph>w</emph> = 0.83. Children successfully retrieved the sticker on 91.6% of trials if they had marked correctly, but only 34.7% of trials if they had marked incorrectly. Older children were also more likely than younger children to successfully locate the sticker, <emph>χ</emph><sups>2</sups>(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref10">1</reflink>, _I_N_i_ = 96) = 10.89, <emph>p</emph> = 0.001, <emph>w</emph> = 0.34 (see Supplementary Table 5 for model details).</p> <p>On some test trials, children that had been trained in the empty‐marked condition continued to mark the incorrect container, as demonstrated during training, and then selected the incorrectly marked container when searching for the sticker. In the empty‐marked condition, 3‐year‐olds did this on 38.54% of trials, 4‐year‐olds on 20.83% of trials, and 5‐year‐olds on only 7.29% of trials (see Supplementary Table 6 for descriptive data). Some children also showed this behavior after being trained in the target‐marked condition, with 3‐year‐olds doing so on more test trials (14.58%) than 4‐year‐olds (9.38%) and 5‐year‐olds (3.13%). This suggests that inferring the useful <emph>combination</emph> of marking the correct container and subsequently searching that marked container was particularly difficult for 3‐year‐olds compared to the older children.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-18">DISCUSSION</hd> <p>Our results revealed that, after being demonstrated the effective solution during the target‐marked training, 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children correctly marked the rewarded container more frequently than expected by chance. This is in line with past work showing that children of this age are proficient imitators (Nielsen & Blank, 2011), as the participants in this group simply had to copy the demonstrated strategy in order to optimize their performance. When trained in the empty‐marked condition, however, children needed to recognize that the demonstrated strategy was suboptimal, and that marking the rewarded container rather than an unrewarded container would lead to more successful performance. In this condition, only 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children correctly marked the rewarded container above chance levels. Although all age groups showed improvement across trials when trained in the target‐marked condition, only 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds (i) showed this improvement effect in the empty‐marked condition; and (ii) typically continued to mark correctly on subsequent trials after devising the most effective strategy. By contrast, many 3‐year‐olds regressed to marking incorrectly. While some 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds have demonstrated an ability to offload cognitive demand following demonstrations of the target behavior (Armitage et al., 2020; Bulley, McCarthy, et al., 2020), this is the first time children of this age have been shown to spontaneously devise their own external strategy to improve cognitive performance (cf. Armitage & Redshaw, 2021; Bulley, McCarthy, et al., 2020).</p> <p>Although it is difficult to draw conclusions from null results, one interpretation of the 3‐year‐olds' comparably poorer performance in the empty‐marked condition is that they struggled to disengage from their present knowledge of the sticker's location and recognize that they would be uncertain about this location in the future. Many 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds, by contrast, appear to have recognized this potential future uncertainty and acted to preclude it by marking the rewarded container. This interpretation is consistent with the broader metacognition literature, which has documented a transition between 3 and 4 years in the acquisition of basic metacognitive capacities (Geurten & Willems, 2016). Whereas previous research suggests that 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds know when they <emph>do not</emph> know something, the current results suggest that children of this age also know when they <emph>will not</emph> know something, and can translate this knowledge into intelligent compensatory actions. Our findings similarly align with work showing that many 4‐year‐olds, but few 3‐year‐olds can prepare for mutually exclusive future possibilities (Redshaw & Suddendorf, 2016; Robinson et al., 2006), which may also rest on an awareness of future uncertainty (Bulley, Redshaw, et al., 2020; Redshaw & Suddendorf, 2020).</p> <p>Note, however, that our results do not imply that 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children possess an equivalent capacity for cognitive offloading as shown by older children in other tasks (Armitage et al., 2020; Armitage & Redshaw, 2021; Bulley, McCarthy, et al., 2020; Redshaw et al., 2018). Instead, we have simply demonstrated that many children of this age can spontaneously devise external solutions when an optimal internal solution is unavailable. In other tasks where it is possible (but difficult) to perform optimally using internal processing alone, there has been very little evidence of spontaneous cognitive offloading in such young children (Armitage & Redshaw, 2021; Bulley, McCarthy, et al., 2020). Indeed, it may not be until later in development that children typically begin to weigh up the costs and benefits of available internal and external solutions and offload accordingly (Gilbert et al., 2020). Furthermore, although our results show that 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children can watch a demonstration of an ineffective external strategy and then spontaneously modify that strategy to improve their future performance, there is currently no evidence that they can independently innovate an effective external solution without such social influences (see Carr et al., 2016). Future studies may therefore wish to examine when children become able to devise external solutions to problems like ours unprompted, rather than in a forced‐choice situation. What we have established here, however, is that by age four, children can spontaneously devise effective external solutions to combat their own future uncertainty.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-19">ACKNOWLEDGMENTS</hd> <p>We thank Queensland Museum and its patrons for their participation in the study. This work was supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award awarded to JR (DE210100005), an ARC Discovery Project to TS and JR (DP210101572), and a Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fund to AT and TS (20‐UOA‐126).</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-20">CONFLICT OF INTEREST DISCLOSURE</hd> <p>The authors hereby declare no conflicts of interest.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-21">ETHICS APPROVAL STATEMENT</hd> <p>Ethical approval was obtained through The University of Queensland's Faculty of Health and Behavioural Science's Ethics Committee (Clearance ID: 2019000267).</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-22">AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS</hd> <p>KLA assisted with study design, collected and analysed data, wrote the first draft and edited the manuscript. AHT designed the study and edited the manuscript. TS assisted with study design and edited the manuscript. JR assisted with study design, edited the manuscript, and supervised the project.</p> <hd id="AN0156322669-23">DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT</hd> <p>The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/ryxa9/.</p> <p>GRAPH: Supporting information.</p> <ref id="AN0156322669-24"> <title> REFERENCES </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Armitage, K. L., Bulley, A., & Redshaw, J. (2020). Developmental origins of cognitive offloading. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 287 (1929), 20192927. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2927</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Armitage, K. L., & Redshaw, J. (2021). Children boost their cognitive performance with a novel offloading technique. Child Development, 00, 1 – 14. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13664</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Balcomb, F. 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  Data: Metacognition plays an essential role in adults' cognitive offloading decisions. Despite possessing basic metacognitive capacities, however, preschool-aged children often fail to offload effectively. Here, we introduced 3- to 5-year-olds to a novel search task in which they were unlikely to perform optimally across trials without setting external reminders about the location of a target. Children watched as an experimenter first hid a target in one of three identical opaque containers. The containers were then shuffled out of view before children had to guess where the target was hidden. In the test phase, children could perform perfectly by simply placing a marker in a transparent jar attached to the target container prior to shuffling, and then later selecting the marked container. Children of all ages used this external strategy above chance levels if they had seen it demonstrated to them, but only the 4- and 5-year-olds independently devised the strategy to improve their future performance. These results suggest that, when necessary for optimal performance, even 4- and 5-year-olds can use metacognitive knowledge about their own future uncertainty to deploy effective external solutions.
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