2022 Volume 70 Issue 1 Pages 1-18
The present study examined why preschool children do not respond "I don't know" (DK) to unanswerable questions. The participants in the study were twenty-four 3-year-olds (10 boys, 14 girls), thirty-one 4-year-olds (12 boys, 19 girls), and thirty-five 5-year-olds (18 boys, 17 girls). They were asked answerable and unanswerable questions, which were presented in either a closed-ended or an open-ended format. They were then asked why they knew or did not know the answer, after which the experimenter confirmed their answer by telling them whether it had been correct. The results indicated that the 5-year-olds made fewer "don't know" responses to the closed-ended unanswerable questions than the 3- and 4-year-olds did, whereas no age-related differences were observed for the "don't know" responses to the open-ended unanswerable questions. Moreover, when the 5-year-olds were asked to explain why they knew the answers to the closed-ended unanswerable questions, they answered that they had guessed. The 5-year-olds also tended to change their answers or guess in response to the confirming questions. However, no age-related-differences were found in these responses. The present findings suggest that 2 different cognitive processes, "unaware of the possibility of guessing" and "aware of the possibility of guessing," may explain why children do not answer that they do not know.
