Children's Understanding of Cognitive Cuing: How to Manipulate Cues to Fool a Competitor

Abstract

4-6-year-old children's understanding of cognitive cuing was studied in 2 experiments using a strategic interaction paradigm. Children could fool a competitor by hiding targets in locations that were labeled with semantically weakly associated cues and help a cooperative partner by hiding them in semantically highly associated locations. Very few 4-year-olds, half the 5-year-olds, and almost all 6-years-olds appropriately chose semantically highly vs. weakly associated hiding places to make the targets easy vs. difficult to find. The second experiment showed that 4-year-olds did not strategically manipulate cues as sources of information, although they themselves proficiently used them as such in a search task. These findings are discussed with regard to research on children's developing understanding of origins of knowledge and belief and with regard to recent claims that young preschoolers possess a metacognitive understanding of cognitive cuing.

Young children's understanding of interpretation, expectation and direct perception as sources of false belief

“…Thus, when given memory tasks, 3-to 5-year-olds often fail to prepare external retrieval cues, such as a marker indicating the location of a hidden object, to aid recall later on (Fabricius & Wellman, 1983). Likewise, children under 5 years of age do not seem to appreciate that an associated cue can be used as a clue to an object's location (Sodian & Schneider, 1990). In addition, Flavell, Green & Flavell (1993) reported that 4-year-olds demonstrated little awareness that mental life consists of a continuous stream of consciousness in which one thought may stimulate a sequence of related thoughts.…”

Children's Understanding of the Stream of Consciousness

“…Indeed, it is difficult enough for adults to do. Gordon and Flavell (1977) found that preschoolers have little understanding of what they referred to as cognitive cueing, that is, the tendency of one thought to trigger another, related thought, which in turn triggers yet another, and so forth (see also Sodian & Schneider, 1990). It seems possible iJiat children's understanding of cognitive cueing and of the stream of consciousness might develop together, with each concept perhaps facilitating the acquisition of the other.…”

Development of tactical deception from 4 to 8 years of age

“…In general, this work demonstrates that the early forms of deception, up to the fourth year, are unsophisticated and consist of attempts to withhold information by not confessing to transgressions (Lewis et al, 1989), or by removing incriminating evidence (Chandler et al, 1989). In a variation on the hiding game used with chimps, Sodian and Schneider (1990) showed that only a few 4-year-olds, half the 5-year-olds, but almost all the 6-year-olds were able to effectively use tactical strategies. Similarly, using a lying paradigm, Talwar, Gordon, and Lee (2007) demonstrated that 6and 7-year-olds engaged in strategies to avoid lie detection, including providing incorrect answers to questions designed to entrap them, while children between 3 and 5 years of age were more likely to blurt out correct answers, revealing their hidden intentions to a partner.…”