title: Infants ask for help when they know they don't know.
abstract: Uncertainty monitoring is a core property of metacognition, allowing individuals to adapt their decision-making strategies depending on the state of their knowledge. Although it has been argued that other animals share these metacognitive abilities, only humans seem to possess the ability to explicitly communicate their own uncertainty to others. It remains unknown whether this capacity is present early in development, or whether it emerges later with the ability to verbally report one's own mental states. Here, using a nonverbal memory-monitoring paradigm, we show that 20-month-olds can monitor and report their own uncertainty. Infants had to remember the location of a hidden toy before pointing to indicate where they wanted to recover it. In an experimental group, infants were given the possibility to ask for help through nonverbal communication when they had forgotten the toy location. Compared with a control group in which infants had no other option but to decide by themselves, infants given the opportunity to ask for help used this option strategically to improve their performance. Asking for help was used selectively to avoid making errors and to decline difficult choices. These results demonstrate that infants are able to successfully monitor their own uncertainty and share this information with others to fulfill their goals.
authors.affiliation: Brain and Consciousness Group, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, F75005 Paris, France lougoupil@gmail.com sid.kouider@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Goupil
authors.affiliation: Brain and Consciousness Group, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, F75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Margaux
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Romand-Monnier
authors.affiliation: Brain and Consciousness Group, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, F75005 Paris, France lougoupil@gmail.com sid.kouider@ens.fr.
authors.forename: Sid
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kouider
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D008568:Memory; D009633:Nonverbal Communication / Q000523:psychology*; D035501:Uncertainty
keywords: cognition; infants; metacognition; performance monitoring; uncertainty