Understanding memory confidence in childhood: Evidence from self-reflection and vignette scenarios

Abstract

While researchers have examined the link between children's memory confidence and accuracy, little is known about how children understand what confidence represents. This study involved interviewing school-aged children ( N = 253; 6- to-14-years-old) about their conceptualization of memory confidence as well as the related term ‘sureness’. Children also completed a vignette task in which the story character expressed either low, moderate, or high confidence in a memory that was later confirmed to be correct. Children's explanations showed developmental differences. Older children provided more explicit definitions and showed greater use of abstract reporting methods, such as numeric scales. Children generally treated confidence and sureness as similar overlapping concepts, although confidence was more often linked to broader ideas such as bravery and thinking ahead. In the vignette task, children were sensitive to the character's expressed confidence, with judgments that he was correct increasing as his expressed confidence increased. Children also frequently interpreted expressed confidence in social terms, particularly as signs of honesty or sincerity. These findings suggest that children's confidence reasoning is shaped by developing metacognitive understanding, but also by how children understand confidence-related language and interpret expressed certainty through social contexts.