Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

From something as simple as judging the time to more complicated behaviours like answering trivia questions, ourcognitive systems always provide us with a representation of confidence: the probability of being correct. The developmentof confidence has been a long-standing issue in cognitive and developmental science. However, most studies assess children’sconfidence through either extensively trained numerical or verbal scales (“I am sure”), or by asking children to gamble on theiranswer. These measures stand to confuse metacognition with the development of language and inhibitory control. Here, wevalidate a novel model and task that measures individual and developmental differences in confidence relatively (“Are you moreconfident in X or Y”). Subsequently, we apply this task to demonstrate that metacognitive abilities of children aged 5–8 showsignificant development in the domain of intuitive number representations. These results are discussed in a broader context oftheory and measurement of metacognition.