The nature of young children's inaccuracy in predicting their own memory performance was studied using categorical and unrelated material. Twenty-four children at each of four grade levels (kindergarten and grades two, four, and six) were presented with 18 cards bearing pictures of concrete nouns. Categorical pictures were presented on the right half of the array, and unrelated items were on the left. The children were asked to predict which items they would later recall, and to justify why they predicted recall for those particular items. Both recall and prediction accuracy increased developmentally. Kindergarteners were significantly less accurate than older children in predicting recall. Older children's justification indicated that they were aware of the characteristics of items which make them memorable; while younger children tended to refer to their own alleged cognitive abilities. For example, older children referred to the familiarity or difficulty of items, while kindergarteners mentioned their own smartness or good memory. Signal detection analysis of recall performance and recall prediction data indicated, however, that the mean level of separation of memorable from nonmemorable items varied as a function of list and not grade level. Also, there was no grade by list interaction. These results suggest that children's sensitivity to such information is not a developmental variable, and that young children's poorer performance is due instead to a more liberal response criterion, or a tendency to overpredict the number of items they will remember. (Author/SS)