Young Children's Understanding of the Conditions for Knowledge Acquisition

We report 3 studies directed to children's understanding of how evidence leads to knowledge. The studies as a whole span a range of ages (4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds), a variety of sources of information (perception, communication, and inference), and a number of targets or recipients of the information (adult, child, baby, and self). Perception proved to be the easiest source to understand, and inference was the most difficult. There was no difference in the accuracy of judgments for the self and judgments for others. Judgments were least accurate for the baby, primarily because children tended to overestimate babies' ability to acquire knowledge from communication or inference. Although performance in general improved with age, the tendency to overestimate the baby was greatest among the oldest children. The results are discussed in terms of children's understanding of 2 contributors to knowledge formation: situational (the nature and adequacy of the informational source) and individual (the cognitive readiness of the recipient of the information).