Children's ability to impute inferentially based knowledge.
Do young children appreciate the importance of access to premises when judging what another person knows? In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N=31) were sensitive to another person's access to premises when predicting that person's ability to point to a target after eliminating alternatives in a set of 3 cartoon characters. Experiment 2 replicated the finding when 5- to 6-year-olds (N=102) judged who the other person thought the target was, and whether the other person knew who the target was. Experiment 3 demonstrated that children aged 5-7 years (N=107) more successfully imputed inference by elimination than syllogistical inferential knowledge. Findings suggest that an early understanding of inference by elimination offers a route into understanding that people can sometimes gain knowledge without direct perceptual access.
Rai
Roshan
R
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
Mitchell
Peter
P
D001076:Aptitude; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007600:Judgment; D007721:Knowledge of Results, Psychological; D008297:Male; D018187:Personal Construct Theory; D011340:Problem Solving