9514821 TAYLOR Recent research has shown that young children absorb the information they are taught without realizing that they are learning something new. For example, once 4- and 5-year-olds learn a novel fact such as the function of litmus paper, they claim to have known the new information for a long time. They also have difficulty identifying which information they have known longer, a fact the experimenter taught them a minute earlier (e.g., the name of the color chartreuse) or a fact they have known for a long time (e.g., the name of the color green). Across a variety of tasks, young children fail to attend to transitions in their own knowledge and claim they have always known what they have just learned. The evidence indicates that these results are due to a genuine conceptual difficulty, rather than a desire to appear knowledgeable to the experimenter or some other superficial aspect of the task. This research will provide an in depth investigation of cognitive explanations for this phenomenon. Children's failure to report learning something new seems related to the way they understand the mind and their concept of what it means to have knowledge. The experiments will test the hypothesis that children's developing knowledge about the mind affects the way they encode learning events and retrieve new information in memory. In addition, this work will explore the factors affecting children's ability to notice the acquisition of new information. The findings of this research will provide new information about the development of children's concept of knowledge, the extent that children's understanding of mental life influences the way they encode everyday events involving learning, and the conditions that help preschool children become more aware of changes in their own knowledge. This work will potentially have educational implications because development in children's understanding of knowledge influences the effectiveness of different metho ds of instruction and children's motivation to engage in learning activities. ***
