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Children's Understanding of Cognitive Cuing: How to Manipulate Cues to Fool a Competitor
Author(s) -
Sodian Beate,
Schneider Wolfgang
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1990.tb02812.x
Subject(s) - psychology , cognition , metacognition , cognitive psychology , cognitive development , task (project management) , developmental psychology , management , neuroscience , economics
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‐year‐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.