The feeling of knowing experience in educable retarded children.

Educable retarded children were required to predict their recognition accuracy when recall failed. Older children (Mental Age = 8 and 10) could predict reliably their recognition accuracy suggesting sensitivity to their own feeling of knowing experience but the younger subjects (Mental Age = 6) showed no evidence of this sensitivity. Even though the younger children had difficulty predicting their recognition accuracy in advance they were able to estimate the success or failure of their responses after they had occurred. The results are discussed in terms of the complexity of the metamemory judgment required and the advisability of evaluating metamemorial knowledge across several situations was emphasized.