Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Accurately predicting one's own performance outcomes is a crucial skill for children and adults alike. Prior research, however, has shown that young children are notoriously overoptimistic, making predictions far beyond their actual performance. Curiously, these findings contradict decades of work showing that infants and children hold reasonable expectations about the world, showing surprise---an indication of prediction error (PE)---when events violate their expectations. If children have well-calibrated expectations about their own performance, they might experience PE when they produce unrealistically good outcomes. Using a probability-based game (Experiment 1, N=48) and a memory-based game (Experiment 2, N=64), we show that preschoolers are indeed overoptimistic in their explicit predictions, but express surprise after achieving precisely those unrealistic performance outcomes they predicted. These results demonstrate an early-emerging sensitivity to prediction error about the self, revealing a striking discrepancy between what children say they can do and what they think they can do.