Children's Failure to Make Judgements of Undecidability when they are Ignorant

Abstract

In five investigations we tested 5 to 7-year-olds' ability to make appropriate judgements of "undecidable". Children pointed at the picture they thought might be a named familiar or unfamiliar cartoon character from a set of 5, and were asked if they knew or didn't know their chosen picture was the target. Judgements about familiar targets were accurate, but children often failed to make correct "don't know" judgements ("undecidable") about unfamiliar targets. This was not simply because children felt "don't know" was too negative an expression, given that their chosen picture might have been the target, since varying the wording had little effect: "just think" and "just hope" contrasted with "know"; "hard" contrasted with "easy"; "don't know" contrasted with "is it [target name] or isn't it". Further results showed that children were not simply avoiding loss of face caused by admitting to ignorance, nor were they simply committed to their chosen picture. Finally, asking children if they had ever heard of the target before, increased the likelihood of their subsequently making correct "undecidable" judgements. We discuss why "undecidable" judgements might be difficult for children to make, and why alerting them to lack of past experience via their correct judgements of "never heard of.." was beneficial to their making correct judgements of "undecidable".