Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2012 Jan;111(1):52-64. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2011.06.011. Epub 2011 Aug 20.
Infants and young children often perseverate despite apparent knowledge of the correct response. Two Experiments addressed questions concerning the status of such knowledge in the context of a card-sorting task. In Experiment 1, three groups of 3-year-olds sorted bivalent cards one way and then were instructed to switch and sort the same cards using new rules under varying conditions of support offered by congruent flankers. Although formal aspects of the task such as higher-order rule use, stimulus redescription, and dimensional shifting remained constant across all conditions, use of the new rules increased with parametric increases in environmental support for the use of the new rules. In Experiment 2, 3-year-olds were more likely to switch and use new rules when test stimuli were flanked by congruent flankers rather than neutral flankers, even though both conditions made equivalent demands on attentional inhibition. Thus, in both experiments, children's knowledge of the new rules proved to be adequate under less demanding conditions but inadequate under more demanding conditions. These findings are consistent with the idea that children's knowledge is graded in strength rather than present or absent.
婴儿和幼儿常常坚持自己的错误回答，尽管他们显然知道正确的答案。两个实验探讨了在卡片分类任务背景下，这种知识的状态问题。在实验 1 中，三组 3 岁儿童以一种方式对双价卡片进行分类，然后根据提供的一致侧翼支持的不同条件，使用新规则进行相同卡片的分类。尽管任务的正式方面（如高阶规则使用、刺激重描述和维度转换）在所有条件下保持不变，但新规则的使用随着环境对新规则使用的支持参数的增加而增加。在实验 2 中，当测试刺激被一致的侧翼而非中性侧翼包围时，3 岁儿童更有可能转换并使用新规则，尽管这两种情况对注意力抑制都有相同的要求。因此，在这两个实验中，儿童对新规则的知识在要求较低的情况下证明是足够的，但在要求较高的情况下则不够。这些发现与儿童的知识是分级的，而不是存在或不存在的观点一致。
