Concepts of Mental Activities and Verbs in Children of High and Average Verbal Intelligence

In order to understand the contribution of increased cognitive abilities to children's naive theories of mind, children of high and average verbal intelligence rated their understanding of the interrelationships between and among mental activities and verbs. In Study 1, participants rated the similarity of pairs of prototypical mental activity scenarios according to the "way you use your mind" in each one. The scenarios represented the categories of list memory, prospective memory, comprehension, selective attention, inference, planning, comparison, and recognition. In Study 2, participants rated the similarity of cognitive and affective verbs (e.g., decide, memorize, love, worry). Multi-dimensional scaling and clustering analyses indicated very similar organization and structure of concepts in children of high and average verbal intelligence in both studies. These results add to the growing body of literature suggesting that metacognitive development and its association with intelligence differ depending on the type of metacognition being examined (Alexander, Carr, & Schwanenflugel, 1995).