We assessed the ability of preschool children to assign the most difficult tasks to a symbolic helper. First, children were taught that a toy "helper" could aid them in remembering the location of a hidden item. Children preferentially assigned the helper to the objectively most difficult locations to remember. Each child then completed eight more tests, assessing a range of different skills such as counting, object identification, and word reading. Children again could assign some stimuli in each task to the helper, leaving the remaining stimuli for themselves to respond to in the given tasks. They were not explicitly told to assign the hardest stimulus to the helper. However, children consistently still did so in most tasks, although some tasks showed an effect of age where older children were more proficient in assigning the objectively more difficult stimuli to the helper. These results highlight a potential form of metacognition in young children in which they can monitor difficulty across varied kinds of assessments and use a generalized tool for asking for help that does not require verbal responding.

中文翻译：

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分而治之。

我们评估了学龄前儿童将最困难的任务分配给象征性帮助者的能力。首先，教会孩子们玩具“帮手”可以帮助他们记住隐藏物品的位置。儿童优先将助手分配到客观上最难记住的位置。然后，每个孩子又完成了八项测试，评估了一系列不同的技能，例如计数，物体识别和单词阅读。孩子们可以在每个任务中给助手分配一些刺激，而剩下的刺激则让他们自己在给定任务中做出反应。没有明确告知他们要对助手分配最困难的刺激。但是，孩子们在大多数任务中仍然坚持这样做，尽管某些任务显示出年龄的影响，较大的孩子更客观地将客观困难的刺激分配给助手。这些结果突显了幼儿中元认知的一种潜在形式，在这种形式中，他们可以监控各种评估中的困难，并使用通用工具寻求不需要口头反应的帮助。