Recent research in metacognition has described a sequence in young children's understanding of sources of knowledge (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Wimmer, Hogrefe & Perner, 1988; Sodian & Wimmer, 1987; Gopnik & Graf, 1988). In general, children can make use of knowledge before they can reliably identify the sources of that knowledge. The conclusion itself is unsurprising, but the effects of task variations in studies of this aspect of metacognition suggest some interesting structural properties of the observed age related differences. Under some circumstances, the perspective of another person can simplify, rather than complicate, the child's problem of identifying sources of knowledge. Depending on conditions, it is sometimes easier for young children to identify indirect than direct sources of information. As in other domains, the amount of support the child requires to perform correctly and reliably bears an inverse relation to the developmental complexity of performance.
The mistakes children make in identifying the sources of the information they possess demonstrate the extent to which they can distinguish knowledge from its sources. Both 3 and 4 year old children can assess whether they possess relevant information in a memory task; of the two groups, however, only 4 year olds can justify their belief that they know by pointing to relevant experience; five year olds are far more reliable in justifying their beliefs than 4 year olds (Wimmer, et al., 1988). In addition, performance in identifying the source of information appears to be highly sensitive to the context of the task.
It is ordinarily supposed that the introduction of another perspective into the cognitive problem confronting a young child (cf., Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The use to which the other perspective is put, plays an important role, however, in whether the second perspective actually complicates the task. It is possible to infer from answer...