s about another person's mere possession of knowledge if a child's own ability to identify sources of information is masked by an unfamiliarity with requests for justification (Wimmer, et al., 1988). The child who correctly imputes possession of knowledge to a person who could have acquired that knowledge only through inference apparently understands that inference can function as a source of knowledge.
Inference itself presents certain problems of interpretation with respect children's understanding of sources of information. Sodian and Wimmer (1987) found inference to be difficult for young children to identify as a source information. Gopnik and Graf (1988) found that very young children find inference relatively easy to identify as a source of information. On the one hand, inference is a more complex route for obtaining information than is receiving a verbal report of the same information. On the other hand, task complexity can facilitate memory because its very complexity may foster unintentional rehearsal (Mandler, 1972); in some way, better memory for an item may affect memory for its experiential source. Rehearsal, moreover, can only improve memory performance if the subject has attained a sufficient level of cognitive sophistication (Flavell, 1977).
The identification of the source of information involves memory at two levels. First of all, it is necessary to remember previous events to make judgements about their informational relevance. Second, reflectivity appears to play an important role in memory performance. Awareness of having acquired some episodic information may have implications for the organization of memory (Mandler, 1980). Recall and recognition both depend on conscious access to previous experiences; higher memory processes require conscious recollection, which involves the explicit identification of sets of related experiences (Graf & Schacter, 1985). Knowledge about the origin of a ...