Confidence can be experienced for all kinds of decisions – evaluating the value of a piece of artwork, determining whether the lights are flickering, or remembering where we left our keys. These are fundamentally different kinds of decisions, but does that mean the confidence we feel is also fundamentally different for each one? Here, we test competing theories of domain-generality and domain-specificity in metacognitive ability by correlating individual differences in memory and perceptual confidence judgments in childhood. Children performed a recognition memory task and an area discrimination task followed by confidence judgments. Using 4 measures of metacognitive ability (indicated by higher confidence for accurate compared to inaccurate judgments: difference scores, meta-d’, MRatio, and HMeta-d’), we find no significant correlations between this ability in memory and perceptual tasks. These findings support an account of domain-specificity in children’s metacognitive abilities.

From something as simple as judging the time to more complicated behaviours like answering trivia questions, ourcognitive systems always provide us with a representation of confidence: the probability of being correct. The developmentof confidence has been a long-standing issue in cognitive and developmental science. However, most studies assess children’sconfidence through either extensively trained numerical or verbal scales (“I am sure”), or by asking children to gamble on theiranswer. These measures stand to confuse metacognition with the development of language and inhibitory control. Here, wevalidate a novel model and task that measures individual and developmental differences in confidence relatively (“Are you moreconfident in X or Y”). Subsequently, we apply this task to demonstrate that metacognitive abilities of children aged 5–8 showsignificant development in the domain of intuitive number representations. These results are discussed in a broader context oftheory and measurement of metacognition.

It can be difficult to uncover the truth when presented with two conflicting beliefs. Adults integrate beliefs in a rational way by placing more weight on beliefs help with high confidence than beliefs with low confidence. Here, we investigate the development of this rational integration in 5- to 10-year-old children. Children at all ages selected the higher confidence belief if confidence differed, and older children (8-10) preferred an integrated belief when two informants presented beliefs with equal confidence. We interpret this as evidence that children use expressed confidence to inform rational decision-making, consistent with the principles of rational cue combination.

Previous research has shown that our subjective sense of certainty doesn't always accurately reflect the strength of the evidence that has been presented to us. We investigate several key factors that drive children's certainty using a Boolean concept learning task. We created an idealized learning model to predict children's accuracy and certainty during the experiment, given past evidence that they have seen in the task, and we compared its predictions with our behavioral results. Our results suggest that while predictors from the idealized learning model capture children's accuracy, behavioral predictors generated by the behavioral data can better predict children's certainty. We also show that younger children's certainty can be explained by the idealized learning model, while older children's certainty is primarily predicted by how well they observed themselves doing in the experiment.