Abstract
Children do not know everything that adults know, nor do adults know everything that children know. The present research examined the universality of beliefs about child and adult knowledge and their development with 4- and 7-year-old Canadian and Japanese children (N = 96). In both countries, all children were able to identify adult-specific knowledge and only older children displayed beliefs about child-specific knowledge. However, Japanese and Canadian children differed in whether they used their own knowledge in deciding whether a person who knew an item was a child or an adult. In addition, parental and child beliefs were related in Japan but not in Canada. These findings indicate that children growing up in different cultures may take different paths in developing beliefs about age-related knowledge. Implications for theories of socio-cognitive development and learning are discussed.
Highlights
Theory of mind—the understanding of mental states such as beliefs and knowledge—is essential for children’s socio-cognitive functioning
Do the same factors influence Canadian and Japanese children’s age-related knowledge representations? We focus on beliefs about child-specific knowledge because the longer period over which these beliefs appear to emerge allows for greater ontogenetic variability
Replicating previous findings with North American children [33,34,35] and extending them to another culture, our findings reveal remarkable similarity between Canadian and Japanese children
Summary
Theory of mind—the understanding of mental states such as beliefs and knowledge—is essential for children’s socio-cognitive functioning. Much research in this area has elucidated children’s ability to use a person’s behavior and statements to make inferences about the person’s knowledge [1,2,3]. Less is known about children’s representation of knowledge in relation to social group membership. As people can be readily categorized by age, gender, race, and occupation, group-related beliefs may have an immediate influence on children's behavior. We examined children’s beliefs about a person’s knowledge in relation to that person’s age in two cultural contexts: Canada and Japan. Age is perhaps the earliest dimension along which children organize their social world [4] and infants show sensitivity to people’s age by seven months [5,6]
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