CHILDRENS OVERESTIMATION OF THE KNOWLEDGE TO BE GAINED FROM SEEING

In three investigations children aged 4-9 years were given a sequence of trials on each of which they experienced pairs of objects which loo ked the same but felt different (such as full and empty cereal packets ) or felt the same and looked different (such as chocolate bars with d ifferent coloured wrappers). On each trial the experimenter chose one of the items from a pair and children predicted whether they themselve s, or another person or doll, would know which one it was just by seei ng it. In two of the three investigations, even the youngest children showed clear evidence of discriminating in their knowledge judgments b etween the two types of pairs, but nevertheless children frequently ov erestimated the knowledge to be gained from seeing. Errors of overesti mation when the visual input was ambiguous as to feel were correlated with those made when the visual input was ambiguous as to size, sugges ting the children's problem was not specific to understanding about th e modality-specific aspect of knowledge. Furthermore, making it easier for children to isolate the visual input from an object from the non- visual was ineffective in reducing errors of overestimation. These res ults provide no evidence that children had difficulty imagining or iso lating the visual aspect of the chosen object, but suggest that they m ay fail to realize when the input is ambiguous.