Journal of Cognition and Development

ISSN: 1524-8372 (Print) 1532-7647 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hjcd20

Development of Children's Awareness of Their

Own Thoughts

John H. Flavell , Frances L. Green & Eleanor R. Flavell

To cite this article: John H. Flavell , Frances L. Green & Eleanor R. Flavell (2000) Development
of Children's Awareness of Their Own Thoughts, Journal of Cognition and Development, 1:1,
97-112, DOI: 10.1207/S15327647JCD0101N_10

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327647JCD0101N_10

Published online: 13 Nov 2009.

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 JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT, 2000, Volume 1, pp. 97–112
Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Development of Children’s Awareness of

Their Own Thoughts
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John H. Flavell, Frances L. Green, and Eleanor R. Flavell

Department of Psychology
Stanford University

Two introspection tasks were given to 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults. In one,
participants were first asked to think of something they liked to do and something they
did not like to do, and then to say what their specific thoughts had been while they
were thinking. Even the 5-year-olds were able to report some specific thought content
under these highly facilitative conditions. In the other task, participants were asked to
try to have no thoughts at all for a short period of time (20–25 sec). When subse-
quently asked whether they had had some thoughts anyway during this period, all of
the adults and the majority of the 8-year-olds said they had, but only a few of the 5-
year-olds did. These and other findings suggest that young children have some capac-
ity for introspection but are generally much less aware than older children and adults
of their own spontaneous, ongoing ideation.

Research on the development of children’s understanding of the mind shows that

they have acquired some impressive knowledge and skills in this domain by the end
of the preschool period. Reviews of this extensive body of work include Astington
(1993), Bartsch and Wellman (1995), Flavell (1999), Flavell and Miller (1998),
Lewis and Mitchell (1994), Perner (1991), Taylor (1996), and Wellman and
Gelman (1998). As examples of these competencies, older preschoolers show by
their performance on false-belief, appearance-reality, Level 2 perspective-taking,
and other tasks that they possess at least the rudiments of a mental–representational
conception of the mind. That is, they understand that people act on the basis of their
beliefs, even when those beliefs are false, and realize that how things seem or ap-

Requests for reprints should be sent to John H. Flavell, Department of Psychology, Building 420,
Jordan Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305–2130. E-mail: flavell@psych.stanford.edu
 98 FLAVELL, GREEN, FLAVELL

pear can vary with the perceiver’s point of view and can also be different from how
they really are.
However, studies have also documented a number of limitations on young chil-
dren’s theory of mind and metacognitive competencies (Carpendale & Chandler,
1996; Kuhn, in press; Moshman, 1998; Pillow & Henrichon, 1996; Schneider &
Bjorklund, 1998; Schwanenflugel, Henderson, & Fabricius, 1998). One of these
limitations is a marked tendency to underestimate the amount of mental activity
that people experience (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1993, 1995; Flavell, Green,
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Flavell, & Grossman, 1997; Flavell & Miller, 1998). They do not realize that peo-
ple are continually experiencing mental content of one kind or other spontane-
ously—the ever-flowing “stream of consciousness” described by James (1890).
Flavell et al. (1993, 1995) showed in several studies that, unlike older individuals,
preschoolers do not consistently attribute any mental activity at all to a person who
just sits quietly, waiting; they do not seem to be cognizant of what Harris (1995a)
nicely characterized as the “involuntary pulsation of consciousness” (p. 51). Even
more surprising, they do not automatically assume that something must be going
on in a person’s mind, or that the person’s mind must be doing something, even
when they know that the person is looking at or listening to something, reading,
counting, or talking to another person—activities that adults would regard as nec-
essarily involving some cognition.
These same difficulties are also evident when preschoolers are asked to report
their own mental activity rather than another person’s. That is, they tend to be very
poor at recalling or reconstructing both the fact and the content of their own recent or
present thinking (Flavell et al., 1995). As one of many examples, 5-year-olds, who at
the experimenter’s instigation had clearly just been thinking silently about which
room in their house they keep their toothbrush in, often denied that they had just been
thinking. Moreover, in those instances when they did say they had been thinking,
they often did not mention either a toothbrush or a bathroom when asked what they
had been thinking about, and would even deny having had thoughts about these
things when asked about them directly. In sharp contrast, children 7 or 8 years of age
proved to be much more skilled than 5-year-olds at this and other introspection tasks.
Consistent with these results, research by Flavell et al. (1997) indicates that pre-
schoolers are largely unaware of their own ongoing inner speech and may not even
know that speech can be covert. Other investigators have shown that young children
also have difficulty with the more traditional introspection task of reporting their
thoughts aloud as they occur, either while engaged in some cognitive task (talk-
aloud procedure) or in a nontask stream-of-consciousness condition. For a review of
this work plus some new developmental evidence, see Kipp and Pope (1997).
Young children are not completely unable to introspect, however (Estes, 1998;
Harris, 1995b). They will occasionally report the fact and content of their thinking
spontaneously, as in this example from a 3-year-old: “I’m thinking. I’m thinking
of something I like to eat” (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995, p. 59). They may be able to
 CHILDREN’S AWARENESS 99

recall their previous beliefs or other mental states when these states differ from
their present ones (Baron-Cohen, 1991; Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Gopnik &
Slaughter, 1991). They are sometimes able to remember the epistemic and
imaginal origins of their mental representations, for instance whether they had pre-
viously seen or been told something versus having merely imagined it (e.g.,
Woolley & Bruell, 1996). Some may be able to report how they silently computed
the answer to simple addition problems, for example by starting to count up from 4
to themselves when answering the question “How much is 4 plus 3?” (Siegler,
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1996, p. 188). Children are also able to report feelings (e.g., pain, sadness), desires,
and perceptions from an early age (Flavell, 1999).
Estes (1998) and Harris (1995b) suggested that young children may find it eas-
ier to introspect visual images than other kinds of mental content (see also Estes,
Wellman, & Woolley, 1989). Estes recently reported a clever study designed to as-
sess this kind of introspective ability. He gave 4-, 5-, 6-, and 20-year-old partici-
pants 56 trials of experience with a computer game in which Shepard-type mental
rotation was a useful solution strategy (Shepard & Cooper, 1982). On each trial,
they were to judge as quickly as possible whether two monkeys presented in differ-
ent spatial orientations on the computer screen were holding up the same arm or
different arms. No mention was made by the experimenter of the strategy of men-
tally rotating an image of one monkey to see if it could be superimposed on that of
the other. Following the fifth, middle, and final trials, the experimenter questioned
the participants briefly about how they had made their judgments. Estes observed
an increase with age in the percentage of participants whose reaction-time patterns
indicated that they had mentally rotated one monkey to compare it with the other
one. More to the point, he also found a marked increase with age in the percentage
of these “rotators” who, when questioned, showed some awareness that they had
been using a mental rotation strategy. The biggest increases in both measures oc-
curred between 4 and 6 years, with the 6-year-olds being impressively similar to
the adults on both strategy use and awareness of strategy use; the main difference
between the two older groups was that more of the adults reported the strategy
when first questioned, after the fifth trial. Similarly, Flavell et al. (1997) found that
5-year-olds, unlike 4-year-olds, showed some ability to recognize when they had
thought about something by forming a visual image of it versus having thought
about it by saying its name covertly.
Given these mixed results, what should we conclude about the introspective ca-
pabilities of young children and how might we conceptualize the possible subse-
quent development of these capabilities? A good starting point is Estes’s (1998)
suggestion that the ability to introspect should not be thought of as a single, unitary
ability that one can be said to either possess or not possess. Feats of introspection
differ widely in difficulty and introspectors differ widely in the likelihood that they
can or will perform them. Much as with other kinds of cognition, whether a given
introspection occurs must depend jointly on the introspector, the to-be-
 100 FLAVELL, GREEN, FLAVELL

introspected content, and the contextual support for the introspective act. Regard-
ing the first of these, it is obvious that there are large individual differences even
among adults in introspective disposition, ability, and experience; compare great
writers or the highly trained introspectors in the psychology laboratories of old
with extremely repressed individuals or other adults who seem largely unwilling
or unable to access their inner lives. There must also be great variation in the acces-
sibility of different sorts of introspective contents. It is one thing to be aware that
one is experiencing a strong, persistent sensation, emotion, or desire, for example,
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and quite another to notice and remember the nuances of some faint and fleeting
vagrant thought (Hurlburt, 1990, 1993). Even young children would be expected
to be able to do the former, whereas even introspectively gifted adults might find
the latter challenging. The likelihood of an introspection occurring should, thus,
depend to a considerable extent on the salience, subtlety, and complexity of its
content (cf. Estes, 1998). Finally, appropriate introspections should be more likely
to occur if individuals know in advance that they will be asked to report their men-
tal events, are given instruction and practice in doing it, observe a model doing it,
are set to generate and report specific kinds of thought contents, are provided with
good retrieval cues at introspection time, or are given other forms of assistance.
The studies reported in this article were designed to test two hypotheses sug-
gested by this analysis and the previous literature. The participants were 5-year-olds,
8-year-olds, and adults. The first hypothesis was that 5-year-olds would be able to
report their thoughts if the thoughts were simple and familiar and if substantial con-
textual support for having and reporting them was provided. Following brief instruc-
tion, modeling, and practice in introspection, participants were asked to close their
eyes and think about and imagine doing something they like to do. They then were
asked to do the same thing for something they do not like to do. Then they were asked
to open their eyes and say what thoughts they had been having. Thus, in this think
task they were first told what types of thoughts to try to have, then given time to have
thoughts of those types, and then asked to report the specific thoughts they had. We
expected that 5-year-olds would perform quite well on this introspection task.
The second hypothesis was that 5-year-olds would be less likely than 8-year-
olds, and far less likely than adults, to notice the occurrence of thoughts that they
not only did not expect to have, unlike the case in the previous introspection task,
but actually intended not to have. This hypothesis was motivated by the belief that
awareness of one’s own spontaneous, undirected, often unintended, and essen-
tially unstoppable stream of consciousness increases with age and is an important
part of what develops in this area. To test this hypothesis, the same participants
were given a second, not-think task in which they were asked to close their eyes
and try not to think about anything at all—to try to keep their minds completely
empty of all thoughts. Then, 20 to 25 sec later, they were asked whether they had
had some thoughts or no thoughts during this period. We assumed that none of the
participants could go that long without having any thoughts at all, in spite of—and
 CHILDREN’S AWARENESS 101

perhaps partly because of (Wegner, 1992)—any efforts they might have made to
suppress them. We assumed that only the older participants would perform well on
this introspection task. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to try to iden-
tify, in the same group of participants, some introspective competencies that
young children have acquired and some others that they have yet to acquire.
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STUDY 1

Method

Participants

Two groups of children and one group of adults were tested, with 20 partici-
pants in each group. The younger child group consisted of 11 female and 9 male
kindergartners. Their mean age was 5 years, 10 months (range = 5 years, 3 months
to 6 years, 5 months). The older child group was composed of 12 female and 8
male third graders. Their mean age was 8 years, 6 months (range = 8 years, 3
months to 9 years, 5 months). The adult group consisted of 14 female and 6 male
college students. The participants were from primarily upper middle-class fami-
lies, and were mostly White and Asian. Two female experimenters, hereafter re-
ferred to as E1 and E2, tested all of the participants.

Procedure

All participants were given about 4 min of pretraining, then a think task, and
then a not-think task.

Pretraining. The pretraining consisted mainly of the following five steps:

1. E2 modeled performance on two trials of a simple word-association task, in

which E1 said a stimulus word and E2 was scripted to respond with the first one-
word thought (Trial 1) or one-phrase thought (Trial 2) that came to her mind.
2. The participants were given two trials with this same procedure, responding
with their first thoughts to the words big and hard, respectively.
3. E1 presented another stimulus word to E2 but this time E2 was instructed to
(a) close her eyes, (b) think of two things the word makes her think of, and (c) not
to report those two things until E1 told her to. E1 then said “ocean,” and, after a 5-
sec delay, asked E2 what two things she had thought about. E2 said “waves, and
the nice smell of salt water.”
 102 FLAVELL, GREEN, FLAVELL

4. The same procedure (Step 3) was modeled a second time, but this time with
E1 and E2 switching roles.
5. The participants were then given two trials with this same procedure.
6. E1 concluded the pretraining by saying that people also have thoughts that
they do not try to have sometimes (example provided) and that sometimes thoughts
happen so fast it is hard to notice or remember them.
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Think task. Participants moved to a chair marked “Think” and were given a
brief preview of what they were about to do. Then they were asked to close their
eyes, cautioned not to say anything until told to, and asked, first, to think about
something they would really, really like to do, and then to imagine themselves do-
ing it. Then they were asked to do the same regarding something they really do not
like to do. Immediately afterward they opened their eyes and moved to a second
chair, and E1 said: “When you were sitting in that Think chair just then, what
thoughts were you having? Tell us all the thoughts you had.” After participants
seemed to have finished their report, they were asked whether they had had any
other thoughts, what their first thought had been, what their second thought had
been, and so on, and whether they had or had not also thought about what they had
for breakfast (a validity check).

Not-think task. E1 began by observing that there are some things that she and
other grown-ups can do with their minds (personal example given: able to remember
some of the events of a past holiday) and some things they cannot, no matter how
hard they try (e.g., remember every tiny event that happened that day). Then partici-
pants were seated in a chair labeled “Do Not Think” and E1 told them that they would
soon be asked to close their eyes and try not to think of anything—try to keep their
minds completely empty of any thoughts. After checking to make sure participants
could repeat this instruction, E1 said: “Let’s start. Close your eyes and cover them
up. I want you to try not to think. Try to keep your mind completely empty. Try not to
have any thoughts at all. I’ll tell you when to open your eyes.” After a pause of 20 to
25 sec, participants opened their eyes and moved back to the original chair. Then E1
said: “While you were sitting over there in that Don’t Think chair, you tried not to
have any thoughts. After you closed your eyes, what happened? Did you have no
thoughts at all or did you have some thoughts anyway (order of mention of these two
options counterbalanced)?” If participants said they had had some thoughts, they
were successively asked to describe all the thoughts they could remember, to report
any additional ones they could recall, whether trying to keep themselves from hav-
ing thoughts had been hard or easy and why, and whether they had done anything to
try to keep themselves from having thoughts. If, instead, participants said they had
had no thoughts, they were asked only the last two questions.
 CHILDREN’S AWARENESS 103

TABLE 1
Percentage of Correct Responses to Think Task Questions

Age

5 Years 8 Years Adult

Measure Study 1 Study 2 Study 1 Study 2 Study 1 Study 2

A like and a dislike 85 75 95 100 100 —

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Order of thoughts recalled 50 70 60 70 90 —

Not breakfast 65 75 90 85 100 —
Imagines an activity 0 10 45 55 90 —
Mentalistic words 25 40 70 65 95 —

Results

Table 1 shows how the three groups of participants performed on the think task. In
response to E1’s initial request to report all the thoughts they had had while sitting
in the Think chair moments earlier, all 60 participants responded appropriately by
mentioning at least one activity they liked, and all but three 5-year-olds and one 8-
year-old also mentioned at least one activity they did not like (first row of Table 1).
These data provide support for our first hypothesis: Five-year-olds definitely can
report some recently experienced mental content under highly facilitative task
conditions.
However, age differences in performance were also conspicuous even in this
simple introspective task. Older participants were more accurate than younger
ones in their introspective reports (second and third rows of Table 1). First, they
were better able to recall the order in which their thoughts had occurred (thoughts
about liked activities first, thoughts about disliked activities second), c2(2, N = 60)
= 7.8, p < .05. Second, they were better able to reject breakfast as a topic that had
been thought about while in the Think chair, p < .001 by Fisher’s Exact Test.
In addition, the older participants often acted as if they were attempting to recall
or reexperience internal mental events as such as opposed to just identifying the
liked and disliked external activities to which these events referred, whereas the
younger ones mostly seemed to be doing just the reverse (cf. Flavell et al., 1995, p.
75). This is the distinction that the philosopher Rosenthal (1993) made between
self-consciously reporting a thought and unself-consciously expressing one. The
two experimenters independently scored each participant’s responses for two very
similar and overlapping possible measures of the former attempt, and subse-
quently resolved any disagreements by discussion. Interjudge agreement prior to
discussion was 93% for the first measure and 97% for the second. The first mea-
sure (fourth row of Table 1) was whether the participant reported having actually
imagined herself or himself engaged in at least one liked or disliked activity rather
 104 FLAVELL, GREEN, FLAVELL

than just reporting the activity itself. For example, “When you asked me I pictured
myself riding on a train” was scored for this measure, whereas “What I like to do
is, I like to play with my friends” was not. The second, partly redundant measure
(fifth row of Table 1) was whether the participant ever used a mentalistic word or
phrase such as thought, think, thinking, imagine, picture, or the like. There were
marked increases with age on both measures, c2(2, N = 60) = 32.7, p < .001 for the
first, c2(2, N = 60) = 21.7, p < .001 for the second.
Finally, the introspective reports of the older participants tended to be consider-
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ably longer and richer than those of the younger ones. For example, the group
mean numbers of words per report were 23 for the 5-year-olds, 56 for the 8-year-
olds, and 112 for the adults, F(2, 57) = 21.6, p < .001. These age differences in
length of report were due in part to some of the older participants commenting on
their thought processes. An unusual example was this adult’s meta-metacognitive
statement: “I thought about, ‘Hmmm, is that what I want to be thinking about right
now?’” None of the 5-year-olds, 3 of the 8-year-olds, and 10 of the adults were
scored for this category (interjudge agreement = 95%), p < .04 by Fisher’s Exact
Test. The following was a fairly typical 5-year-old report: “Playing soccer is my
favorite thing to do and fighting is my worst favorite thing to do.” In contrast, this
conveys the flavor of most adult reports:

When I was thinking of something I like to do, I was thinking of roller skat-
ing. I was thinking about moving around the floor, flowing, and listening to
the music and enjoying myself. And then when I was thinking about what I
didn’t like to do, I was thinking about going to the library and pulling my
books out of my backpack and sitting down at the table for 4–5 hours and
studying for my finals that I have the next day.

The participants’ performance on the not-think task is summarized in Table 2.

The most important results are presented in rows 1 and 2. The first row shows how
many participants in each age group said that they had had one or more thoughts
and also said what the thought or thoughts were. Some of the children either denied
having had any thoughts but subsequently reported at least one mental event (e.g.,
an image), or said they had had thoughts but could not recall them. The second row
includes these participants as well as those in the first row and, thus, provides a
more generous estimate of participants’ introspective ability in this task situation.
There was a highly significant increase with age in the number of participants
scored for each measure, c2(2, N = 60) = 29.8, p < .001 for the first, c2(2, N = 60) =
27.9, p < .001 for the second. These data strongly support our second hypothesis:
Five-year-olds are less likely than 8-year-olds, and far less likely than adults, to
notice the occurrence of ideation they did not intend or expect to have.
Participants were also asked to say whether they had done anything to try to
keep themselves from having thoughts in the not-think task. As Table 2 shows
 CHILDREN’S AWARENESS 105

TABLE 2
Percentage of Correct Responses to Not Think Task Questions

Age

5 Years 8 Years Adult

Measure Study 1 Study 2 Study 1 Study 2 Study 1 Study 2

Said had thoughts and reported some 15 15 60 75 100 —

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Reported some mental activity 25 30 80 90 100 —

Reported mental strategy 10 25 45 60 95 —
Said hard to do 40 40 50 80 85 —
Gave general explanation of why hard to do 0 5 20 10 75 —

(third row), there was a significant increase with age in the number of participants
who reported having used some kind of mental activity to try to avoid having any
thoughts, c2(2, N = 60) = 29.2, p < .001. An example would be “I told myself not to
think.” The fact that all but one of the adults said that they had done something to
try to avoid having thoughts might mean that they were not completely convinced
a priori that the stream of consciousness cannot be dammed, or it may simply mean
that they were willing to give it a try despite doubts about its success. In any case,
these data also attest to the development of introspective ability, because recalling
mental activities aimed at preventing thinking is itself a form of introspection.
Finally, there was a significant increase with age in participants’ tendency to
say that trying to keep themselves from having thoughts had been hard rather than
easy (fourth row of Table 2), c2(2, N = 60) = 9.2, p < .02. When asked why it had
been hard, no 5-year-olds, four 8-year-olds, and 15 adults were judged to have said
either that the mind is always thinking, it is impossible not to think, or the like, or
that the act of trying not to think is itself a form of thinking (interjudge agreement =
89%), c2(2, N = 60) = 27.9, p < .001. These results provide additional evidence for
a developing attunement to one’s ongoing mental experiences and a general sense
of what the waking state is like, mentally.
As was true in the think task, there was an increase with age in the not-think task
in the length and richness of the introspective reports of those participants who
said they had had some thoughts. The mean numbers of words per reports were 12,
51, and 87, respectively, for the five 5-year-olds, the twelve 8-year-olds, and the
20 adults concerned. This was perhaps the richest 5-year-old report: Just as she
was asked to open her eyes she commented spontaneously

That’s too hard. [E1 asks what she means.] I couldn’t do it. [E1 asks the test
question.] I had some thoughts anyway. [E1 asks what they were.] Just sort of
like blank thoughts. [E1 urges her to report all the thoughts she can remem-
ber.] Riding my bicycle. I can’t remember anything else.
 106 FLAVELL, GREEN, FLAVELL

In contrast, this was one of the richer 8-year-old reports:

Well, for a little bit of time I thought about black, how black it was, and then I
thought about, oh, a nice big splash of magenta, and then I thought, “Oh, it’s
impossible not to think” [giggles] and then I thought, “Ooh, a nice orange,”
and then I saw a clay face that sort of looked like the face I saw before only it
didn’t have ears, and then I think I saw a little bit of black and then you asked
me to open my eyes.
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Most of the adult reports were of comparable richness.

STUDY 2

It seemed possible that some of the children in the Study 1 not-think task may have
failed to report thoughts they had actually recalled because they had been instructed
to try not to think and felt that reporting thoughts would constitute failure or disobe-
dience. Therefore, in Study 2, we repeated the entire Study 1 procedure (both tasks)
with a new sample of 5- and 8-year-olds, but this time including a new sentence in
the not-think task instructions that was designed to reduce this possibility.

Method

Participants

Two groups of children were tested, 20 in each group. The younger group con-
sisted of 10 male and 10 female kindergartners. Their mean age was 5 years, 9
months (range = 5 years, 3 months to 6 years, 5 months). The older group included 10
male and 10 female third graders. Their mean age was 8 years, 9 months (range = 8
years, 1 month to 9 years, 5 months). As in Study 1, the participants were from pri-
marily upper middle-class backgrounds, and they were mostly White and Asian.

Procedure

The pretraining, think task, and not-think task procedures were all exactly the
same as in Study 1, except that a new sentence was inserted in the not-think in-
structions just prior to the sentence: “After you closed your eyes, what happened?”
The new sentence was: “Sometimes people—grown-ups too—have thoughts even
when they are trying not to.” We hoped that this would communicate to the chil-
dren both that thoughts can occur under such circumstances and that it would be
acceptable to report them if they did.
 CHILDREN’S AWARENESS 107

Results

The principal results of this study are summarized in Tables 1 and 2. As Table 1
shows, the two age groups performed on the think task much as their counterparts
had done in Study 1. For example, 19 of the 5-year-olds in Study 2 reported a liked
activity (vs. 20 in Study 1) and 15 reported a disliked activity as well (vs. 18 in
Study 1). Similarly, as in Study 1, the 8-year-olds were intermediate between the 5-
year-olds and the Study 1 adults on measures suggesting an awareness that one is
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recalling thoughts about activities rather than just recalling the activities them-
selves (rows 4 and 5).
The most important result of Study 2 was that the 5-year-olds were not aided on
the not-think task by the additional sentence in the instructions suggesting that
even grown-ups sometimes have thoughts when trying not to. Rather, as in Study
1, only a small minority of the 5-year-olds reported having had any thoughts while
sitting in the Not Think chair (Table 2, rows 1 and 2). This suggests that they failed
to report thoughts because they really were not aware of having had any, rather
than because they felt they should not report them. In contrast, the 8-year-olds in
Study 2 appear to have performed somewhat better on the not-think task than did
the 8-year-olds in Study 1. Whether this (nonsignificant) improvement should be
credited and, if credited, attributed to the added sentence is uncertain. Overall, the
main impression one gets from looking at the two tables and the children’s tran-
scripts is that the results of Study 1 were quite clearly replicated in Study 2.

DISCUSSION

Five-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults were given two tasks designed to assess
their ability to introspect. Consistent with some previous studies (e.g., Estes, 1998),
5-year-olds were able to report some recent mental events under highly favorable
task conditions (the think task), thereby showing at least some capacity for intro-
spection. However, these tasks also revealed striking age differences in introspec-
tive ability. In the think task, older participants gave longer introspection reports
than younger ones, were more accurate in recalling the order and content of their re-
cent thoughts, and more often seemed to be deliberately introspecting rather than
just identifying things they did and did not like to do (reporting vs. expressing
thoughts). In the not-think task, in which participants were asked to try not to think
and were subsequently asked if they had had thoughts anyway, older participants
were more likely than younger ones to report having had thoughts anyway, to report
mental strategies designed to prevent thoughts from occurring, to say that prevent-
ing the occurrence of thoughts was hard to do, and to give a general explanation of
why it was hard to do. All of these behaviors suggested a greater awareness of their
mental events on the part of the older participants. Most measures indicated that the
 108 FLAVELL, GREEN, FLAVELL

8-year-olds were intermediate in introspective ability between the 5-year-olds and

the adults. We were particularly impressed with the 8-year-olds’ performance on
the not-think task, arguably a more demanding test of introspective competence
than the think task. Only 1 participant in this age group gave evidence of expecting
that not thinking for any extended period of time would be impossible a priori.
(“Well, I figured it out just before I closed my eyes that it is really impossible not to
think any thoughts at all,” this child said.) Even though the rest of the 8-year-olds
seemed to expect that they would or might have no thoughts, just as the younger
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children presumably did, the majority of them noticed that they had some anyway.
This unintended noticing of unintended thoughts seems to us to be particularly
compelling evidence for a developing introspective sensitivity to the occurrence of
spontaneous ideation. It is also consistent with previous findings showing a marked
increase in introspective ability between 5 and 7 years of age (Flavell et al., 1995;
see also Estes, 1998). However, the differences between the 8-year-olds’ perfor-
mance and that of the adults shows that introspective competencies also continue to
develop after this age.
We can imagine a number of possible reasons why the 5-year-olds might not
have reported thoughts on the not-think task, and more generally why children of
this age might tend to perform poorly on introspection tasks.

1. The 5-year-olds had no thoughts of any kind while in the Do Not Think chair,
and therefore had nothing to report. This explanation seems implausible on its face.
It is tantamount to saying that, unlike older people, young children do not have a
continuous or near-continuous stream of consciousness when in a conscious state.
There is also empirical evidence against it. As noted earlier, Flavell et al. (1995)
found in several studies that 5-year-olds would often deny having had thoughts
even when it was not just likely, but virtually certain, that they had just had some
(e.g., about which room they keep their toothbrush in). This is not to claim that the
thoughts must have been quantitatively and qualitatively similar in the three age
groups, of course, but only to argue that the 5-year-olds must have had some
ideation during the 20- to 25-sec not-think period.
2. The 5-year-olds did have thoughts, but these thoughts were not conscious
enough to be capable of being noticed. Although this might be possible, it does not
seem very likely. It is hard to see why children’s thoughts would be less conscious
than adults’ when they are in a normal, waking state of consciousness.
3. Possibly distinguishable from this second explanation, the 5-year-olds did
have potentially noticeable, conscious thoughts but they were less able or less dis-
posed than the older participants to notice them. This possibility seems plausible to
us, and is consistent with the results of most previous studies in this area (Flavell et
al., 1993, 1995; Flavell et al., 1997). These studies suggest that young children of-
ten simply do not appear to notice the occurrence of ideation that one would think
would be very easily noticeable.
 CHILDREN’S AWARENESS 109

4. The 5-year-olds did have conscious ideation and did notice it, but in some
cases, at least, did not construe it as “thoughts” and therefore did not report it. We
believe that this could account for some failures to report thoughts in the 8-year-
old group as well as the 5-year-old group. Recall that a few children at each age
level initially denied having had “thoughts” on the not-think task but then went on
to report some form of ideation (compare rows 1 and 2 of Table 2). However, the
children’s prior experience in the pretraining and the think task with their own and
the experimenters’ introspective reports should have provided most of them with a
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fairly liberal, inclusive construal of the term thoughts by the time they were given
the not-think task. Similarly, an experimenter’s explicit modeling of introspective
performance in two studies by Flavell et al. (1995, Studies 11 and 12) did not im-
prove the subsequent introspective performance of 5-year-olds on very similar
tasks, suggesting that failure to construe the task demands correctly is not the most
important problem for children of this age. Nevertheless, it continues to be a cause
for concern in studies like these.
5. The 5-year-olds did notice their thoughts and correctly construed them as
thoughts, but the previous instructions to try not to think made them loathe to re-
port them. As already mentioned, the similarity in results between Study 1 and
Study 2 argues against this interpretation. Also arguing against it is the fact that 5-
year-olds have often failed to report their thoughts in task situations in which there
could be no possible reason to withhold them (Flavell et al., 1995).
6. The 5-year-olds could and would have reported their thoughts if they had
been allowed to report them at the moment they occurred. However, the time inter-
val between the end of the participants’ stay in the Do Not Think chair and the ex-
perimenter’s request to introspect was only a few seconds. Furthermore, in several
of Flavell et al.’s (1995, Study 14) tasks, 5-year-olds did not perform well even
when asked to report their current, ongoing thoughts rather than those of the recent
past. In one of these tasks, for example, 5-year-olds were clearly expecting a bell to
ring at a certain moment, as it had done before, but it kept on not ringing. However,
when asked, “Are you wondering about or thinking about anything right now, or
not?” only 38% reported relevant ideation such as “Wondering when you are go-
ing to ring that thing” (one 5-year-old’s response). This said, it still seems likely
that limitations in memory or other general information processing skills play
some role in young children’s shortcomings as introspectionists.
7. The 5-year-olds lacked the verbal and expressive ability to make a full,
nuanced report of their ideation. This is certainly very possible, and probably at
least partly explains the greater brevity of the young children’s introspections. On
the other hand, in this and other studies (Flavell et al., 1995) even the briefest re-
ports of thought content counted as evidence of some introspective ability, and yet
many young children failed to report anything at all. In the not-think task, for exam-
ple, 5-year-olds were entered in the first or second row of Table 2 merely for saying
brief, 5-year-old-type things like “toys,” “my baby sister,” “riding my bicycle,” and
 110 FLAVELL, GREEN, FLAVELL

“toy soldiers and castles.” Only a few of them did this, however. Likewise, just say-
ing “the bell” would have counted as an introspection in the task mentioned in the
preceding paragraph (Flavell et al., 1995).

Of these seven possible causes of young children’s relatively poor performance

on introspection tasks, we believe that all but the first, second, and fifth have some
plausibility. However, we also think the third—relative insensitivity to their own
ongoing conscious cognition—will prove to be the most important. Assuming this
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to be true, there remains the question of why this insensitivity. Most mental states
are just not very noticeable—as mental states. We tend to think right through them
to their meanings and their referents in the outside world, much as we look through
eyeglasses rather than see them (Zelazo, 1996, p. 73). Moreover, this is surely the
adaptive thing to do most of the time; imagine what our lives would be like if we
paid conscious attention to every mental state as such in addition to whatever the
state was about. Therefore, it is not surprising that the disposition and ability to in-
trospect (in appropriate moderation) would require time and experience to de-
velop. Acquiring a mental lexicon and its associated folk theory of mind would
undoubtedly comprise one important class of formative experiences here. For ex-
ample, learning to think and talk about mental events in more differentiated and
nuanced ways should help children notice the occurrence of their own mental
events. Another, perhaps less obvious class might be various experiences associ-
ated with formal schooling (Astington, 1995; Flavell et al., 1995; Olson, 1994):

In formal school settings children are given cognitive tasks and problems and asked to
do directed, sometimes effortful mental work in order to try to solve them. They may be
asked to recall the mental steps leading up to their solution, to think again or think
harder, to keep their minds on whatever they are supposed to be thinking or doing, or to
do other things that call attention to mental activity. They also engage in verbal thinking
in the form of reading, writing, and arithmetic calculations. Such verbal thinking is apt
to be overt or semiovert in young learners and therefore relatively easy for them to de-
tect and reflect on; they can literally hear themselves thinking. It has long been known
that metacognition may facilitate school activities such as reading (e.g., Garner, 1987).
The suggestion here is that the reverse may also be true: repeatedly engaging in such
mental activities in school may facilitate children’s knowledge and awareness of their
own and other people’s mental lives. (Flavell et al., 1995, pp. 90–91)

Whatever its causes, the acquisition of this disposition and ability is surely an im-
portant development (Flavell et al., 1995, pp. 86–88; Harris, 1995a; Jost,
Kruglanski, & Nelson, 1998). It helps children learn what they and other people are
like subjectively and, thus, what it is like to be a person. It helps them realize that, be-
cause they themselves are continually hosting a variety of mental states, other people
must be too. These acquisitions in turn position them to try to monitor and regulate
their own mentation, and also to try to read and influence the mentation of others.
 CHILDREN’S AWARENESS 111

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant

MH40687. We are grateful to the children, teachers, and parents whose cooperation
made these studies possible.
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