Abstract

Selective social learning is our ability to learn efficiently from our environment. Previous research has suggested that complex mechanisms such as metacognition, or one’s ability to reflect upon their thoughts, and theory of mind (i.e., the ability to reflect upon others’ mental states) scaffold the emergence of selective social learning. Metacognition can be separated into implicit (indirect demonstrations of knowledge; e.g., gestures, requesting help) and explicit skills (explicitly express knowledge; e.g., confidence about knowledge). Implicit and explicit metacognition have an inconsistent relationship in the literature. Past work has shown that implicit metacognition as well as theory of mind can predict selective social learning. This study sought to further explore those links by broadening the tasks used in addition to comparing different metacognition tasks (which used different implicit and explicit metrics) to test their concurrent validity. We hypothesized that 1) implicit metacognition would predict selective social learning and that 2) the explicit metacognitive measures would be correlated, as would the implicit metacognitive measures. For exploratory purposes, we explored the concurrent relationship between explicit and implicit metacognitive skills with these tasks, which had not yet been attempted. We were unable to replicate a link between implicit metacognition and selective social learning or theory of mind and selective social learning, however trending inter-task correlations between the two explicit metacognitive measures suggest that the latter may be measuring the same skill. Finally, our intra-task correlations were also trending, suggesting better implicit metacognitive skills could possibly be related to better explicit metacognitive skills.