Knowing How You Know: Young Children's Ability to Identify and Remember the Sources of Their Beliefs

GOPNIK, ALISON, and GRAF, PETER. Knowing How You Know: Young Children's Ability to Identify and Remember the Sources of Their Beliefs. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1988, 59, 1366-1371. Young children's understanding of the sources of their beliefs was investigated. 3, 4, and 5-year-olds learned about the contents of a drawer in 3 different ways: they saw the contents, were told about them, or inferred their identity from a clue. Children were then asked, immediately and after a brief delay, how they knew about the contents of the drawer. 3-year-olds had difficulty identifying the sources of their knowledge, while 5-year-olds did not. Moreover, even 3-year-olds who could correctly identify the source immediately had difficulty remembering the source after a delay. Explicit training in identifying sources did not improve the 3-year-olds' performance. These results support the hypothesis that children learn about the causal relation between the world and the mind between 3 and 5 years of age.