Peer-reviewed article

Three-year-old Children Make Explicit Metacognitive Judgments - If Asked Appropriately.

Marlene M Meyer, Marina Proft, Jan Engelmann, Hannes Rakoczy · 23 Oct 2026

Abstract

Metacognition-the capacity to represent and reflect upon our knowledge and its sources-is fundamental for higher cognition and learning. Developmental research suggests that the ability to make explicit metacognitive judgments emerges surprisingly late, not before school age. However, this research has assumed that metacognition is optimized for private reflection and therefore tested children's metacognitive judgments in individual settings. In contrast, recent theoretical approaches propose that explicit metacognition may have a primarily social function and should therefore become most evident in socio-communicative contexts. We tested this proposal across four pre-registered studies (N = 195). First, we conducted two studies in which 3- and 5-year-old children participated in a social version of a well-established metacognition task (partial ignorance task). Children had to communicate their uncertainty towards a cooperative partner who relied on their advice. Even 3-year-olds provided accurate metacognitive judgments under these conditions: They spontaneously and explicitly reported uncertainty when they were partially ignorant, but not when they were knowledgeable. Two control studies yielded mixed evidence regarding the question whether the enhanced metacognitive performance in the first two studies was indeed mainly due to the socio-communicative context rather than other factors. Overall, the current findings suggest that explicit metacognition manifests earlier in development than previously assumed and may be boosted in some-particularly socio-communicative-contexts.