The Development of Intuitions about Cognitive Cueing

Abstract

GORDON, F. ROBERT, and FLAVELL, JOHN H. The Development of Intuitions about Cognitive Cueing. CmHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1027-1033. Children 33 and 5 years of age were tested for their intuitive knowledege of the psychological fact that 1 mental event may trigger or cue another related mental event (called the concept of cognitive cueing). A child who had acquired this commonplace but important concept should recognize that a visible depicted object would be a good cue or marker for the location of a hidden depicted object if the 2 were associatively related in the searcher's experience, but would not be if the 2 were unrelated. Data from several location-marking tasks suggested that many of the 31-year-olds had not developed more than a very rudimentary level of understanding of the concept and that many of the 5-year-olds may have acquired only an intermediate level, behavioral-cueing precursor of it. There is reason to believe that it may emerge around the beginning of middle childhood.