When we take a test, we have some idea of how well we’re going to do. When we start a task, we can predict how long it’ll take us to finish it. When we field a question, we can judge whether we need to consult the oracle of Google. We can do all of this because of a skill called metacognition—the ability to reflect upon our own minds, to monitor their degree of certainty, to have knowledge about our knowledge. Now, a new study from Louise Goupil, Margaux Romand-Monnier, and Sid Kouider at Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University suggests that we have this ability from a very early age. Even twenty-month-old infants have some sense of how well they remember the location of a hidden toy, and they’ll ask for help if they’re uncertain. That might not be surprising to you but many previous studies have concluded that preschoolers have terrible metacognition. They’ll claim to know what’s hidden inside a box whose contents are a total mystery. Or they’ll say they’re certain about which of two toys is hidden, when they only have a 50:50 chance of guessing the right answer. At that age, they suck up knowledge at a breakneck pace, but they suck at reflecting on that knowledge. They’re metaignorant, apparently. 
 
 Not so, says Goupil. She thinks that these early results said more about the experiments than the infants. Perhaps the tasks were just too hard and the children “couldn’t report if they were sure or unsure because they were just confused all the time,�? she says. “And maybe they’re bad at talking about their own mental states, but can reflect on their own competencies and knowledge if you ask them to do so non-verbally.�? So she designed a simple wordless experiment. Her team invited 80 Parisian parents to bring their 20-month-old infants to a lab, where Romand-Monnier played with them for a few minutes. She then hid a toy in one of two boxes, either in full view of the infant or behind an obscuring curtain. After a pause of 3 to 12 seconds, she asked the baby to point to the box that the toy was in. Half the babies did so unaided. The other half had the option of silently asking for help from their parents, by turning to them and making prolonged eye contact. The team found that the infants asked for help more often when the task was harder—when the memorization gap was longer (12 seconds versus 3 seconds), or when the toy was being hidden behind a curtain. And because of that, they got better results: The two groups of infants made the same number of right guesses, but those who could ask for help made far fewer wrong guesses. By correctly gauging their own uncertainty, they avoided errors by asking for help, and so improved their performance. “It’s a whole lot of useful information that these babies compute.�? “They didn’t just constantly ask for help, but only when the task was difficult,�? says Uta Frith from University College London, who was not involved in the study. “You can infer from this that they were ‘aware’ that: a) they couldn’t do the task; b) that someone else could do it; c) that that person would be able to tell them how to do it. So it’s a whole lot of useful information that these babies compute.�? ||||| By the time she is 20 months old, your baby can use a spoon and a fork. She can throw a ball. She can find your favorite lipstick and feed it to the dog. She can drop your phone in the toilet and laugh. 
 
 In fact, by 20 months old, she’s doing so many baffling things that you’ve probably wondered: what’s really going on inside that adorable yet frustrating little head of hers? How much does she actually understand about the world around her, and her place in it? 
 
 According to a new study out of the Ecole Normal Supérieure in Paris, France, she knows a lot more than you’d think. 
 
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 Researchers there recently tested 20-month-old babies and found that these infants are already capable of practicing a sophisticated form of thinking called metacognition. According to Dr. Sid Kouider, one of the authors of the study, metacognition is best described as a “gut feeling” about your knowledge, or lack thereof. It’s something we adult humans do on a regular basis—we realize when we face a problem that is too complex for us to answer. 
 
 As Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, “There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.” Knowing what you don’t know? That’s metacognition— an intuition that you are wrong or have somehow made a mistake. 
 
 It was previously assumed that children develop this skill later in life. But, says Kouider, he and his colleagues found that even at this young age, “infants already know when they don’t know something, and they are able to signal this fact to their caregivers” in order to get help solving problems. Their understanding of the workings of their environment, and of their own place within that environment, is much more sophisticated than parents and educators ever imagined. 
 
 Read More: Feeding Peanuts to Babies May Protect Against Allergies, Study Finds 
 
 In past studies, says Kouider, “researchers looked only at what children could verbally report. Since babies can’t verbalize whether or not they understand something, researchers assumed they didn’t have the ability to express uncertainty or to ask a caregiver for help.” But Kouider and his colleagues believed this point of view had to be wrong—after all, study after study has shown that rats, monkeys and other animals are all capable of monitoring their own levels of uncertainty when solving problems in a laboratory. Why shouldn’t young children be able to do the same thing? 
 
 Kouider’s team created a non-verbal memory test to determine whether infants would ask for help to avoid making mistakes. The infants had to remember the location of a toy hidden beneath one of two boxes placed on a table. After a variable delay ranging from three to 12 seconds, the infants were asked to point to the box containing the toy. When they saw where the toy was hidden, they were able to solve the problem without looking to an outside source for help. 
 
 But when the task was made impossible to complete—say, the toy was hidden when the infants weren’t watching so they had no way of knowing under which box it was hidden—they consistently looked over at their parents, who were sitting nearby, for help solving the problem. 
 
 Read More: Babies Are Less Likely to Be Injured If Their Parents Get Paid Leave 
 
 Why does metacognition matter? Kouider says this information is relevant to parents and to anyone else interested in early education. 
 
 Metacognition allows humans to actively seek out new information, and to adapt their learning strategies to specific situations. When children understand that they don’t know everything, and when they know where to look for answers to their questions, they can start to acquire knowledge faster, without repeating the same mistakes over and over again. 
 
 Instead, they develop strategies that will help them find answers to new problems in the future. They learn that they need to look to outside sources for answers to some of life’s puzzles. 
 
 Parents need to remember that their children are capable of learning and questioning from an extremely young age, and they need to support their child’s exploration and questioning. Obviously, this means engaging the child, not just plonking him in front of a screen. It means that even when you’re playing with your baby, he or she is learning about learning. 
 
 And it means not always solving the problem for her right away. “There are 2 ways of teaching new things to a child,” explains Kouider. “The first is to simply give them the information. That’s the usual way we teach them.” The second way—the better way, according to Kouider—is to teach your child how to learn, to teach her how to find answers instead of simply providing the answers for her. 
 
 Also, you might want to hide that phone far away from the bathroom. ||||| Although many animals have been shown to monitor their own uncertainty, only humans seem to have the ability to explicitly communicate their uncertainty to others. It remains unknown whether this ability is present early in development, or whether it only emerges later alongside language development. Here, using a nonverbal memory-monitoring paradigm, we show that infants are able to strategically ask for help to avoid making mistakes. These findings reveal that infants are capable of monitoring and communicating their own uncertainty. We propose that explicit metacognition develops earlier than previously thought, enabling infants to communicate their own uncertainty nonverbally to gain knowledge from others. 
 
 Abstract 
 
 Uncertainty monitoring is a core property of metacognition, allowing individuals to adapt their decision-making strategies depending on the state of their knowledge. Although it has been argued that other animals share these metacognitive abilities, only humans seem to possess the ability to explicitly communicate their own uncertainty to others. It remains unknown whether this capacity is present early in development, or whether it emerges later with the ability to verbally report one’s own mental states. Here, using a nonverbal memory-monitoring paradigm, we show that 20-month-olds can monitor and report their own uncertainty. Infants had to remember the location of a hidden toy before pointing to indicate where they wanted to recover it. In an experimental group, infants were given the possibility to ask for help through nonverbal communication when they had forgotten the toy location. Compared with a control group in which infants had no other option but to decide by themselves, infants given the opportunity to ask for help used this option strategically to improve their performance. Asking for help was used selectively to avoid making errors and to decline difficult choices. These results demonstrate that infants are able to successfully monitor their own uncertainty and share this information with others to fulfill their goals.
– By 20 months of age, many infants are capable of a wide range of skills, from throwing a ball and using a toilet to stringing words together and finding objects. But researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they now have evidence of babies doing more than gathering skills and knowledge—they're capable of something called metacognition, or as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, they're aware that there are "known unknowns." What's more, they turn to caregivers when they realize they don't have an answer for something—as the researchers write, "They consciously experience their own uncertainty." To study this, researchers at the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris developed a non-verbal memory test to get around the fact that most infants aren't yet verbalizing the inner workings of their minds. Gathering 80 Parisian parents and their 20-month-olds, the researchers prompted the babies to remember the location of a toy hidden beneath one of two boxes after a three- to 12-second delay, reports the Atlantic. Turns out they turned to their parents for help as the problem got harder—e.g., after a longer delay, or if hidden behind a curtain. And in doing so, they guessed correctly more often. "Children are capable of learning and questioning from an extremely young age," reports Time. "This means engaging the child, not just plonking him in front of a screen. It means that even when you're playing with your baby, he or she is learning about learning." (Check out why babies smile.)