Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work has demonstrated that interventions like 1) giving in-the-moment performance feedback and 2) pro-viding a strategy rule can improve children’s metacognitive learning. However, there is little evidence to suggest that thislearning transfers to a novel task. We trained 5-year-olds’ metacognitive control in a task requiring participants to select theeasier of two games to acquire the highest amount of points. Compared to a control group who received no training, childrenwho were trained to control behavior (by selecting an easier dot discrimination task) showed greater evidence of transfer to anovel task (by selecting an easier line length discrimination task). This suggests that the learned strategy rule (i.e., to select aneasier task) was not stimulus-specific, and was abstract enough to apply to a novel task with new stimuli. In sum, 5-year-oldswere able to learn a strategy rule and spontaneously apply the strategy to a novel task.