Children's Understanding of Knowledge Acquisition: The Tendency for Children to Report That They Have Always Known What They Have Just Learned

Abstract

Children's attention to knowledge-acquisition events was examined in 4 experiments in which children were taught novel facts and subsequently asked how long they had known the new information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds tended to claim they had known novel animal facts for a long time and also reported that other children would know the novel facts. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, using facts associated with chemistry demonstrations. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were taught new color words. 5-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, distinguished between novel and familiar color words, reporting they had not known the novel words before the test session, but they had always known the familiar words. 4-year-olds in Experiment 4 were better able to distinguish novel and familiar color words when the teaching of the novel words was an explicit and salient part of the procedure.

Introspection & remembering

“…O'Neill et al (1992) report that at this age children come to understand which sense organ to use in order to find out the weight (use hand to lift object) or the color of an object (use eyes to look at it): modality-specificity test. Similarly, Taylor et al (1994) found that between 4 and 6 years, children become able to distinguish between words (e.g., animal or color names) that they have learned recently (e.g., maroon) and those they have known for some time (e.g., red): When-learned test. Also within that age bracket (e.g., Sodian and Wimmer 1987) children become able to distinguish knowledge (success in finding an object after seeing where it was put) from a lucky guess (success in finding the object without having seen where it was put): know-guess distinction.…”

“…These results were partially replicated 1 by Naito (2003) on a Japanese sample. She also found a relationship between free recall and children's ability to understand when they had learned a fact (Taylor et al 1994). 2 In a recent study (Perner et al in press) we used a new measure of episodic remembering, contrasting free recall of experienced events, which can in principle be episodically remembered, with recall of indirectly conveyed events, which can in principle not be remembered, only known.…”

“…has been demonstrated by its effect on the number of adults' "remember" judgments in recall of events . Free recall of experienced events correlated with performance on the How-do-you-know test (Wimmer et al 1988a,b), the when-did-you-learn test (Taylor et al 1994), and the modality-specificity test (O'Neill et al 1992).…”

“…Mental Rotation (RT-slope) Free-cued recall Rohwer (2006, n = 59) 4;9-8;6 .09* experienced-indirectly conveyed Kloo and Perner (2006, n = 31) 5; 0-6; 4 .21** a Naito treated the when-know test by Taylor et al (1994) not as a theory of mind test but as a source memory test and correlated the number of source monitoring errors with free recall partialling out cued recall: "Cued recall was also used as a controlling factor whenever significant correlations involving free recall were observed, as used in the correlation analyses conducted by Perner and Ruffman (1995)." (Naito 2003, p.…”

Children’s development of a theory of mind

“…In both studies, it is as if once children knew what the whole picture looked like, they were unable to take the perspective of someone who had never seen the whole picture. In a third study, Taylor, Esbensen, and Bennett (1994) found that, moments after being taught a novel fact, 4 and 5-year-olds claimed to have known that fact for a long time. In other words, children tended to report to have always known a piece of information that they had just learned.…”