Children's use of information is an issue in ethics and child development. Information is learned from many different sources and source monitoring (see also source-monitoring error) is important in understanding how people use information and decide which information is credible.
Consider the example of a parent whose child has been diagnosed with hyperactivity; the parent searches the internet for information, reads books, participates in an online chat room with other parents in the same situation, and consults various medical professionals. Some of these sources will be credible (contain reliable information), and others will not. To be well-informed, the parent must filter information according to the reliability of the source. Children learn about the world in much the same way. They are told things by numerous people (e.g., teachers, parents, siblings, and friends), see things on the television or internet, and read information in books. Can children be effective consumers of information? At what age are they able to do this? How do they deal with ambiguous resources? This page will detail answers to those questions (and others) by drawing on peer-reviewed scientific research.
The development of source monitoring Young children have more difficulty with understanding and recalling the sources of information than adults do. Although episodic memory improves throughout childhood, development in the area of source monitoring tends to occur between the ages of 3 and 8 years. At 3 years, children who are able to immediately recognize the source of the information they obtain have difficulty recalling this information after a short delay. The development of source monitoring is gradual, and children achieve and display competency in certain aspects of source monitoring before others. The developmental trajectory of source monitoring provides insight into what cognitive factors are necessary prerequisites. While there is no generally accepted unified theory for the development of source monitoring, five major theories contribute ideas about how source monitoring develops in children: source monitoring theory, fuzzy-trace theory, schema theory, person-based perspective, and the mental-state reasoning model.
Source monitoring theory According to source monitoring theory, the source of information is attributed through a decision-making process, where source is inferred based on various characteristics inherent in the memory itself. This means that the sources are not directly encoded, but rather reconstructed, when information is recalled. This decision-making process can either be through automatic, unconscious processing, or through heightened demanding and systematic processing that may require reasoning, and the retrieval of supporting memories. This theory implicates the development of episodic memory and memory strategies in the development of source monitoring more generally.
Fuzzy-trace theory
Fuzzy-trace theory hypothesizes that the source-monitoring errors that children make are caused by problems with memory storage and retrieval. Memories are simultaneously stored in two different formats: the "gist" level (extracted from the experience), and the "verbatim" representation (information in exact detail). It is proposed that the source of information is encoded in memory as a verbatim detail. Memories for verbatim details decay more quickly over time than gist representations, and young children demonstrate faster decay of verbatim information than older children or adults. Younger children are more likely to experience memory intrusions due to weaker memory traces, which leads to a susceptibility to misleading information replacing memory traces from a previous event. For this reason, developmental changes in episodic memory performance are viewed as the driving factor in source monitoring development.
Schema theory
Schema theory, as a derivative of script theory, states that after repeated exposure to similar events, individuals form a general representation of what typically happens.Farrar, M. J., & Goodman, G. S. (1990). Developmental differences in the relation between scripts and episodic memory: Do they exist? In Knowing and remembering in young children, Fivush, Robyn, Hudson, Judith A. eds., (pp. 30-64). Cambridge University Press, New York, NY Some details are the same at each instance of repeated events, and others can vary from instance to instance. In the script for what usually happens, there is a "slot" for each variable detail and the detail for a particular time is chosen from a list of possible variations. If source information is encoded as a slot, errors in source monitoring can be the result of incorrect retrieval of a specific detail. This framework allows for the storage of a large amount of detailed information about specific events, however is very cognitively demanding for children. Because of their limited cognitive resources, young children require more experience with repeated events in order to generate a schema. Details that vary from instance to instance can be lost, and children rely instead on the generalized event representation when attempting to recall a particular instance. The main assumption is that the development of source monitoring depends on an increase in cognitive processing capacity.
Person-based perspective Person-based perspective emphasizes prospective processes. Prospective processes relate actions to one another through operations such as sequencing and planning. These processes are affected by the perspective taken (self vs. other) or the goals and meaning to the individual. The meaning attached to the goal of an action can interfere with source monitoring by removing attention from the source details. The person-based perspective is social-cognitive in nature (more so than other theories of source monitoring) and assumes that development is reliant on socialization and theory of mind development.
Mental-state reasoning model The mental-state reasoning model highlights possible mechanisms behind young children's suggestibility.Welch-Ross, M. (2000). A mental-state reasoning model of suggestibility and memory source monitoring. In Children's source monitoring, Roberts, Kim P., Blades, Mark, eds., (pp. 227-255). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ Children who have difficulty with reasoning about conflicting mental representations are likely to overwrite their original memories with misinformation because they cannot reconcile two contradicting views of what actually occurred. Source monitoring and the understanding of knowledge states, play a key role in resisting suggestions. The development of source monitoring is presumed to be based on better understanding of knowledge states, metacognition and theory of mind.
The origins of knowledge Being aware of how we have acquired information is particularly difficult for young children (specifically 3- to 5-year-olds). After feeling a soft ball, 3- and 4-year-olds can correctly identify whether they know the ball is soft or hard, but cannot always say how they know. Perhaps it is because they felt the ball, saw the ball, or were told it was soft. The ability to recognize the origin of their knowledge requires the understanding of how knowledge is acquired.
Knowledge and justification When asked knowledge questions ("Do you know what is in the box?") then justification questions ("How do [or why don't] you know what is in the box?"), children who can correctly answer are able to reflect on knowledge that they have gained from a particular source and should be able to identify the source of information.
3- and 4-year-olds are better at answering these questions when the questions refer to themselves in comparison to referring to another person. When these children are shown a hidden object they can correctly report their perceptual access (responding correctly to "Did you look into the box?") and their knowledge access of what is in the box (responding correctly to "Do you know [not know] what is in the box?"). Despite their ability to answer correctly when referring to the self, 3- and 4-year-olds have difficulty responding to the "other's" knowledge, where they deny the "other" has the knowledge. 3- and 4-year-olds can correctly identify that the other person has in fact looked in a box, but when asked "Does [other] know what is in the box?" the child will deny that the other person knows what is in the box. The key assumption is then that although children are aware that perceptual access is needed, they are unable to acknowledge that the knowledge was gained from perceptual access.
Gaining knowledge through looking, touching, and asking Gaining knowledge is knowing how to acquire new information. The ability to recognize how specific knowledge can be gained by perceptual access (looking, feeling or smelling) is the understanding of Aspectuality. Aspectuality understanding is the awareness that an object is made up of many different properties (colour, weight, odour), which can be determined by a specific perceptual action (looking, feeling, smelling). Identifying the colour of a car outside the window could involve asking someone for the information or looking out the window. In most cases, adults would acquire this knowledge from simply looking out the window. However, not all information can be gained in this manner. If you were asked to find out how old the driver of the car is, simply looking would not provide accurate information; you would have to ask. These two situations are dependent on whether the information being sought out is visible or invisible (respectively). Knowledge development depends on children's ability to efficiently pursue their informational goal. Children do not always make the most effective or efficient decision when acquiring new information.
Age differences 6-year-olds are able to distinguish when gaining knowledge requires looking (the information is visible) or when gaining knowledge requires asking (the information is invisible). However, 4-year-olds do not perform as consistently. Even with an expert present, 4-year-olds will overestimate the knowledge they can gain through looking. However, when the information to be gained is regarding a group of friends and the expert is a friend of the group, 4-year-olds tend to overestimate knowledge acquisition through asking.
When given access to pairs of objects, which could either be identified by seeing (identical objects: different in colour) or by touch/feeling (identical objects: 1 soft, 1 hard), children perform relatively well, generally recognizing when they have adequate information and when they have inadequate information (i.e., knowing the object is blue after seeing it or knowing the object is soft after feeling it). But, when young children are not given access (of seeing or feeling), they have difficulty predicting and identifying which mode of access would allow them to identify the object. In this case, 3- and 4-year-olds overestimate the knowledge that could be gained through feeling the object. 3- and 4-year-olds may not understand the perceptual access needed to acquire the specific knowledge.
Language and question phrasing Waters and Beck (2012) state "understanding the link between perceptual access and consequent information (knowledge access) is a crucial component in the development of theory of mind". In a typical adult population, change in the phrasing of a particular question would not affect the understanding of what action needs to occur. "What colour is the bike that is outside?" or "Is the bike red?" should not change the action of looking to gain the needed information. However, children's performance is susceptible to this type of question phrasing. There are language effects on knowledge access through 3 different question types:
Identity: "Find out which one is in the tunnel",