Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Across four experiments, we look at whether adults andchildren can represent the amount of information needed todistinguish different populations in the context of an intuitivestatistical reasoning task requiring metacognitive monitoringand control. Consistent with a ground truth model ofinformation gain, adults (N=60) modulated their informationgathering with respect to the difficulty of the discriminationproblem. Adults also adjusted their confidence thresholddepending on task difficulty, allowing for more uncertainjudgments when the discrimination was more difficult orgathering data was more costly (Experiments 1 and 2). In asimplified version of the task, children (N = 42, M = 7.3years, range: 5.0-9.0) were also able to distinguish easy anddifficult discrimination problems and judge that they neededmore information to solve harder problems (Experiments 3and 4).