The neural basis of metacognitive monitoring during arithmetic in the developing brain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In contrast to a substantial body of research on the neural basis of cognitive performance in several academic domains, less is known about how the brain generates metacognitive (MC) awareness of such performance. The existing work on the neurobiological underpinnings of metacognition has almost exclusively been done in adults and has largely focused on lower level cognitive processing domains, such as perceptual decision-making. Extending this body of evidence, we investigated MC monitoring by asking children to solve arithmetic problems, an educationally relevant higher-order process, while providing concurrent MC reports during fMRI acquisition. Results are reported on 50 primary school children aged 9-10 years old. The current study is the first to demonstrate that brain activity during MC monitoring, relative to the control task, increased in the left inferior frontal gyrus in children. This brain activity further correlated with children's arithmetic development over a 3-year time period. These data are in line with the frequently suggested, yet never empirically tested, hypothesis that activity in the prefrontal cortex during arithmetic is related to the higher-order process of MC monitoring.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".