Every day, people must decide what to spend their time on, weighing the costs and benefits of their effort. But the question of how 5- to 7-year-old children decide what’s worth their energy might feel less obvious.
A new study by Brown researchers found that young children weigh their perceived success on prior difficult tasks to decide whether or not to attempt further challenges. Published in the journal Child Development, the study found that young children’s decisions to attempt challenging tasks may depend on how well they believe they performed previously.
In the experiments, researchers evaluated children’s metacognitive monitoring — the process of how individuals evaluate their own performance. At this age, “children are experiencing and undergoing a lot of important developmental changes in their metacognitive reasons (or) how they think about their own thinking,” said Sarah Kiefer GS, the lead author of the paper.
Many studies of children’s decision making are based on “adult paradigms” for research. But according to Kiefer, this means that the tasks are not similar to the everyday choices of real children. Instead, this project sought to “meet children where they’re at” by presenting them with a structured building toy activity.
Children built a gear machine toy and repeatedly chose between easy and hard instructions. After each attempt, they would receive feedback on their accuracy. The tasks would build upon each other toward the end goal of completing the machine.
According to Katherine Kupsaw ’24.5, who worked as a previous research assistant at the lab, the trials last around five to 15 minutes.
“The trial either ended when children refused to continue the game or when they finished the toy, with or without our help,” Kupsaw wrote in an email to The Herald.
Results showed that success on earlier difficult instructions significantly increased the likelihood that children would choose harder instructions later. Performance on easier tasks, on the other hand, did not appear to influence those decisions.
“What mattered for the decision to choose something hard wasn’t their overall accuracy or how they did on the easy instructions, it was just how they did when they explored those hard instructions,” said David Sobel, a professor of cognitive and psychological sciences and principal investigator of the lab.
The study also found that five-year-old kids “were engaging in the same kind of metacognitive monitoring” as the seven-year-old kids, Sobel said.
For Kupsaw, the “biggest takeaway” of the study was that people “often underestimate the ability of children to understand their own thoughts, feelings and strategies.”
It was sometimes difficult to get the children engaged in the game actively participating in the study, according to Kupsaw. “The bright colors and novelty of the game definitely helped with this challenge, but it was still a bit tough,” she said.
Another challenge was recruiting families and kids to participate in these studies, Kiefer said. She believes that “engagement with science has declined a little bit over the past couple years.”
Amrita Rajpal is a senior staff writer covering science and research.
