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Children's Understanding of Knowledge Acquisition: The Tendency for Children to Report That They Have Always Known What They Have Just Learned
Author(s) -
Taylor Marjorie,
Esbensen Bonnie M.,
Bennett Robert T.
Publication year - 1994
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.1467-8624.1994.tb00837.x
Subject(s) - psychology , salient , session (web analytics) , test (biology) , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , paleontology , world wide web , biology
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.