Children's understanding of cognitive cuing: how to manipulate cues to fool a competitor.
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.
Sodian
B
B
Institut für empirische Pädagogik, University of Munich, West Germany.
Schneider
W
W
D001245:Association Learning; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003163:Competitive Behavior; D003210:Concept Formation; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D012660:Semantics