All Together Now: When Dissociations Between Knowledge and Action Disappear

Why do people sometimes seem to know things but fail to act appropriately on the basis of this knowledge? Such dissociations between knowledge and action often occur in infants and children, and in adults following brain damage. These dissociations have supported inferences about the organization of cognitive processes (e.g., separable knowledge and action systems) and their development (e.g., knowledge systems develop before action systems). The current study tested the basis for knowledge-action dissociations in a card-sorting task in which children typically correctly answer questions about sorting rules while sorting cards incorrectly. When questions and sorting measures were more closely equated for the amount of conflict that needed to be resolved for a correct response, children showed no systematic dissociation between knowledge and action. The results challenge standard interpretations of knowledge-action dissociations and support an alternative account based on graded knowledge representations.