Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children – who are undeniably productive learners – think about their learning? Do children understand, as adults do, that learning is a process of continuous improvement over time? To explore children’s emerging representations of the learning process, we created a non-verbal motor learning paradigm where 4- to 8-year-olds predicted their own learning curve without prior experience. We found that by age 7, children predicted improved performance over time. Younger children, however, were overly optimistic about how well they would do at the game and often predicted near-perfect performance across trials. This work suggests that children’s predictions of their future learning curve become more accurate with age, which may have implications for young children’s learning decisions.