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Children's judgements of ignorance on the basis of absence of experience
Author(s) -
Robinson E. J.,
Mitchell P.
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1994.tb00623.x
Subject(s) - psychology , ignorance , feeling , task (project management) , developmental psychology , social psychology , relation (database) , cognitive psychology , epistemology , philosophy , management , database , computer science , economics
In three investigations, 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds judged whether or not they knew familiar and unfamiliar named target characters. When judgements were made in relation to performance on a relevant task, children tended to judge wrongly that they knew who somebody was when in fact they did not know the person. Helping children to focus on their absence of prior experience reduced this performance‐related overestimation. These findings suggest that children's accurate judgements of ignorance are based on awareness of absence of prior experience. However, children who gave accurate judgements of ignorance without help appeared not simply to equate knowledge with prior experience: 4–7‐year‐olds who judged accurately that they did not know unfamiliar dog breeds did not subsequently overestimate their knowledge of breeds to which they had only limited exposure. Therefore, children apparently do not simply switch from using a performance‐based criterion in judging their own knowledge to an exclusively experience‐based one. We suggest that they may come to attend to the absence of a feeling of recognition when they are engaged in performing on a relevant task.