Children's understanding of the stream of consciousness.
Children and adults were tested for their understanding that there is a virtually continuous flow of mental content in a waking person, a "stream of consciousness" that continues to run even when the person is not examining stimuli perceptually or trying to solve a problem. There was a marked increase with age from preschool to adulthood in subjects' tendency to say that a person who was just waiting quietly was having "some thoughts and ideas" rather than "a mind empty of thoughts and ideas." 4-year-olds also tended to say that the mind of a waiting person was "not doing anything," whether that person was another individual or themselves, and that a person who wanted to could keep his or her "mind completely empty of all thoughts and ideas" for 3 min. These results suggest that preschoolers' conceptions of people's mental lives may be quite different from those of older children and adults.
Flavell
J H
JH
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, CA 94305-2130.
Green
F L
FL
Flavell
E R
ER
D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child