title: The effect of delay and individual differences on children's tendency to guess.
abstract: Few researchers have investigated the factors that influence children's tendency to indicate correctly when they do not know the answer to a question. In this study, 5- to 8-year-olds witnessed a staged event in their classroom and were subsequently interviewed about that event either the following day or after 5 months. Some of the questions were answerable based on the information in the event, and some were unanswerable such that children would have had to guess to provide an answer. Individual-difference measures were taken of children's verbal ability and self-perceptions. Delay, verbal ability, and children's self-perceptions all affected whether children correctly indicated when they did not know the answer to a question.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. a.h.waterman@leeds.ac.uk
authors.forename: Amanda H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Waterman
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Blades
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007406:Interview, Psychological / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D012649:Self Concept; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D035501:Uncertainty; D014705:Verbal Behavior