| Recent research and theorizing in cognitive developmental psychology suggests that children's knowledge in various domains, including biology, physics and the mind may be organized as an implicit, or naive theory. Naive theories share three properties with scientific theories: Ontological commitments, conceptual coherence, and an appeal to abstract causal mechanisms. As a first step toward investigating the hypothesis that children's self knowledge is organized as a naive theory, two studies explored whether and when children come to view ability as causally related to their past and future performance.; In Study 1, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children received a negative evaluation of their performance on a focal task. Participants then predicted their performance on three tasks: one that required the same ability (SA) as the focal task, one that shared perceptual features with the focal task, and one that neither required the same ability as, nor shared perceptual features with the focal task. After the experimenter supplanted his prior evaluation with a positive one, children revised their predictions on the three tasks. Children of all ages upwardly revised their prediction on the SA task to a greater degree than their predictions on the other tasks. These results indicate that children believed that their performance on the focal task was due to an underlying causal ability that was also responsible for their performance on the SA task. In Study 2, children were required to predict their performance on a focal task. Prior to making this prediction, children were instructed to select a task (bearing the same relations to the focal task as those of Study 1) that would provide them with relevant information upon which to base a prediction. Only 9-, and 11-year-olds selected the relevant task (SA).; The results of these studies indicate that children's understanding of ability as causal begins to emerge by age 7, but continues to develop throughout middle childhood. The argument is made that children's conception of ability reflects an appeal to an abstract causal mechanism in their self knowledge. Implications of this interpretation are discussed, and a model of the development of self knowledge during middle childhood is proposed. |
