Children's understanding of knowledge acquisition: the tendency for children to report that they have always known what they have just learned.
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.
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403.
M
M
Taylor
B M
BM
Esbensen
R T
RT
Bennett
D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male