Changes in Knowledge Across Time

Abstract

Our study focuses on children’s understanding of their own knowledge and how it changes over time. Preschool-aged children perform above chance when asked about current knowledge, but only children older than 5 years of age performed above chance for past, future, or intraindividual knowledge (Atance & Caza, 2018; Caza et al., 2016). However, we do not currently know whether awareness of past and future knowledge is related. While this type of awareness seems conceptually related to metacognition (the awareness of one’s own ignorance or knowledge; Rohwer et al., 2012), the relation to this skill is unknown. Thus, the goal of the current study is to investigate how children’s awareness of their own epistemic knowledge is related to their metacognitive abilities.
 This study will explore children between the ages of 3.5- through 5-years-old, who will be assessed on their understanding of their current, past, and future knowledge, as well as other tasks assessing metacognitive skills. Further, we will explore the role of theory of mind and inhibitory control. We predict that children who do well on the epistemic knowledge task for the past will display better performance on the task asking about the future, and that both will be related to the other cognitive skills measured.
 Due to the current global situation, we converted our study materials to an online format. Our poster will highlight this process and discuss ways to approach challenges in online developmental testing. Though data collection is ongoing, we present initial insight into the process, drawbacks, and benefits of online testing.
 Keywords: Epistemic Knowledge, Metacognition, Theory of Mind, Child Development
 
 
 References
 Atance, C. M., & Caza, J. S. (2018). “Will I know more in the future than I know now?” Preschoolers’ judgments about changes in general knowledge. Developmental Psychology, 54(5), 857–865. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1037/dev0000480
 Caza, J. S., Atance, C. M., & Bernstein, D. M. (2016). Older (but not younger) preschoolers understand that knowledge differs between people and across time. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 34(3), 313–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12130
 Rohwer, M., Kloo, D., & Perner, J. (2012). Escape from metaignorance: How children develop an understanding of their own lack of knowledge. Child Development, 83(6), 1869–1883. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01830.x