Child Development, March/April 1999, Volume 70, Number 2, Pages 396–412

Development of Children’s Knowledge about Unconsciousness

John H. Flavell, Frances L. Green, Eleanor R. Flavell, and Nancy T. Lin

Children of ages 5, 6, 7, 8, and 10 years, and adults were asked whether people who are sound asleep and
not dreaming could or would: (1) see, hear, listen, notice, think, wish, pretend, and feel things (primary-
consciousness activities), (2) know that they are asleep, and know whether they are or are not engaged in
primary-consciousness activities such as perceiving and thinking (reflective-consciousness activities), (3) delib-
erately decide to or try to perform mental or physical actions (control activities). Results indicated that the rec-
ognition that people do not engage in conscious mental activities when unconscious is still developing during
the late middle-childhood years. We speculate that a developing understanding of consciousness may assist
the development of an understanding of unconsciousness and vice versa, and that sensitivity to the phenome-
nology as contrasted with the content of mental states may be a late acquisition in the theory-of-mind area.

INTRODUCTION bed), one is not aware of doing them and one cannot
decide to do or not do them.
Psychologists have learned a great deal about the de-
We have found only one empirical study of adults’
velopment of children’s knowledge about the mind
intuitions about consciousness (Kemp & Strongman,
during the past decade. Reviews of this extensive
1994), and that one yielded very limited information.
theory-of-mind research literature can be found in, for
In that study, adult participants were merely asked to
example, Astington (1993), Bartsch and Wellman (1995),
indicate whether they thought animals, very young
Flavell and Miller (1998), Lewis and Mitchell (1994),
children, and retarded people “are conscious or aware
Perner (1991), Taylor (1996), and Wellman and Gel-
in the way we are” (not further defined) and then to
man (1992). Despite all this work, however, we still
write a brief definition of what they understood con-
know virtually nothing about children’s understand-
sciousness to be. The authors found that most partic-
ing of certain aspects of the mental world. One of
ipants attributed at least limited consciousness to
these neglected topics is their knowledge about what
these other beings and cited awareness of environ-
mental life is like when one is conscious as opposed to
ment, other people, and/or the self in their defini-
unconscious. We believe that in our culture at least,
tions of consciousness.
most adults have intuitions about the conscious-
It is unclear what children of different ages would
unconscious distinction that run roughly as follows
be expected to know about this aspect of mental life.
(cf. Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1998). When one is con-
We are aware of no previous developmental studies
scious one experiences a more or less continuous
in this area. One might suppose that children would
stream of consciousness (James, 1890) consisting of a
know quite a bit, at least by age 5 or so. There is first
succession of thoughts, percepts, feelings, and other
of all the abundant research evidence that they have
mental states and contents. One is at least intermit-
acquired some knowledge about thinking, perceiv-
tently aware of who one is and what one is currently
ing, feeling, and other mental states by this age (see
doing, oriented in time and place, and able to attend
the reviews just cited). Indeed, much of the research
consciously to both external and internal events. One
literature in this area contrasts the ability of 4- and 5-
is also able to decide to stop doing one thing and do
year-olds to solve false-belief, appearance–reality, and
another; that is, one can to some extent consciously
other theory-of-mind tasks with the frequent inability of
direct, redirect, and otherwise deliberately control
younger children to do so. Furthermore, like their elders,
one’s own physical and mental actions. In marked
they have had daily opportunities to contrast the vivid
contrast, none of these events occur when one is com-
experiences of self and world that they have when
pletely unconscious. In a deep and dreamless sleep
awake with their inability to recall having had any such
state, for example, one may be able to perceive and re-
experiences while deep asleep and not dreaming.
spond to some events at some low, nonconscious
However, there are also reasons to suspect that
level (e.g., stir in response to a sudden noise or some-
children of this age might at least be less aware of the
one’s touch), but one is not aware of having perceived
differences between consciousness and unconscious-
or responded to anything provided that one remains
sound asleep. Similarly, although one may be able to © 1999 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
do certain things while in this state (e.g., turn over in All rights reserved. 0009-3920/99/7002-0010

ness than their elders. For one thing, there is evidence
that they underestimate the amount of mental content
people experience during the waking state (Flavell,
Green, & Flavell, 1993, 1995a). For example, they are
apt not to realize that there is a stream of conscious-
ness that flows spontaneously even when a person is
just sitting idly, not engaged in any task. In fact, they
sometimes even say that nothing is going on in the
mind of a person who is obviously engaged in a cog-
nitive task. In addition, children of this age show very
limited introspective skills (Flavell, et al., 1995a; Fla-
vell, Green, Flavell, & Grossman, 1997). That is, they
often deny that they have just been thinking when
they clearly must have been (e.g., because they had
just been presented with something that is very
thought-provoking), just as they often fail to infer that
others are thinking when they, too, clearly must have
been. If, as appears to be the case, they are less intro-
spective than older people and less aware of the near-
continuous flow of conscious mental experience in
the conscious state, they may also be less aware of its
absence in the unconscious state, and, more generally,
less knowledgeable about levels of consciousness or
attention. The purpose of the present studies was to
probe adult intentions about such matters and com-
pare them with those of children of different ages.
STUDY 1
In this study, 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, 8-year-olds,
and adults were tested for their understanding of the
difference between the mental activities and experi-
ences that occur when a person is conscious versus
not conscious. Participants were read an illustrated
story about various mental activities and experiences
a child had while awake: feeling A, seeing B, listening
to C, thinking about D, and so forth. They were then
asked if the child continued to have these same men-
tal states later, when sound asleep and not dreaming.
A similar method had been pilot-tested previously
with a group of 20 college students. The percentages
of these students who agreed with our intuitions that,
once asleep, the child would not continue to have
these mental states ranged from 85% to 100%.
Method
Participants
Three groups of children and one group of adults
were tested, with 18 participants in each group. The
youngest group, 5-year-olds, consisted of nine boys
and nine girls (mean age in years and months 5 5,4,
range 5 5,0–5,6) drawn from a university laboratory
Flavell et al. 397
preschool. The two older child groups were elemen-
tary school children drawn from a community college
summer program: the (mostly) 7-year-old group con-
sisted of 6 girls and 12 boys (M 5 7,4, range 5 6,9–8,9)
who had completed first grade; the (mostly) 8-year-
old group was composed of 8 boys and 10 girls (M 5
8,1, range 5 7,6–8,8) who had completed second
grade. The adults were 7 male and 11 female college
students. The participants were from primarily upper-
middle-class families, and were mostly Caucasian and
Asian. One experimenter tested the adults and a second
experimenter tested the children.
Procedure
Main tasks. The experimenter showed the partici-
pant the first of several pictures, a line drawing de-
picting a child sitting up in bed with a picture of a
boat on the wall and a tape recorder on the bed. The
child, named Lee, was identified as a boy for male
participants and as a girl for female participants. The
experimenter said: “Lee has been sick all day with a
tummy ache. She (or he) has been feeling sad because
she doesn’t feel well and because she is missing the
trip to the fire station with her class at school. She had
really wanted to see all those fire engines. She spent
the morning looking at the picture of the boat on the
wall; she saw the sun and all the waves; she even
counted how many waves there were.” Picture 2,
with the child in a slightly different position, was then
shown. The experimenter continued: “All morning
long she kept wanting something to drink. ‘I’m so
thirsty today. I really want some ginger ale. Mom said
I could have some with my lunch. I wish I had some
right now!’ While she was in bed, she listened to
some music on her tape recorder. She played her fa-
vorite songs. She also heard the birds singing in the
tree outside her window. She decided to pretend that
she was in a tree house instead of in her bed. But she
knew she was awake in her own bed. Finally Lee fell
asleep just before lunch time (Picture 3 shows her
lying down). Here she is, sound asleep, under the
covers.” The experimenter then gave each participant
experience saying both “yes” and “no” to questions
about Lee by asking, in counterbalanced order: “All
morning Lee has been in bed. Now she’s sound
asleep. Is she still in bed? That’s right/Actually, She is
still in bed.” and “All morning Lee has been sitting
up. Now she’s sound asleep. Is she still sitting up?
That’s right/Actually, she’s not still sitting up.” No
corrective feedback was given during testing.
The questioning continued with reference to cop-
ies of Picture 3, showing the child in a sleep state.
Each of the next eight questions were of the following
398 Child Development

form: “All morning Lee has been ____ (e.g., looking at “While you are asleep and not dreaming can you
the picture of the boat on the wall). Right now, she is know you are asleep, or not?” followed by “How can
sound asleep and not dreaming. Is she still ____ (e.g., you know that?” or “Why can’t you know that?”
seeing the picture)?” The eight states or activities que- The Awareness and Decision questions were pre-
ried in this way were: seeing the picture, wishing she sented in counterbalanced order across participants
had some ginger ale, pretending to be in a tree house, and the order of choices within these questions was
know she’s asleep (as contrasted with the previous: also counterbalanced. The Sleep questions were al-
knew she was awake), thinking about the fire station, ways given last.
listening to the music, hear the birds, and feeling sad.
The eight questions were presented in a different ran-
Results
dom order to each participant within each group,
with the same set of 18 random orders being used for Table 1 shows the percentages of participants in
all four groups. each age group who said that each of the listed mental
Additional tasks. The children in the two elemen- states would not continue to occur after a child story
tary school groups only were then asked the follow- character passed from a conscious waking state to an
ing three sets of questions: unconscious, dreamless-sleep state. As the numbers
Awareness of feeling states. The experimenter said: with asterisks indicate, as a group the 5-year-olds
“Let me explain what I mean by the word ‘aware’. showed a significant tendency to deny to the uncon-
When I am aware of something, I am paying attention scious child only the experience of seeing the picture—
to it. I know it is happening right now. Right now I am not a difficult inference given that the character was
aware that you are sitting across from me. I am paying portrayed with her eyes closed and facing away from
attention to you. I am also aware that the chair I am sit- the picture. In contrast, the two older child groups
ting in is uncomfortable. Well, I asked two children significantly denied auditory as well as visual experi-
about what it feels like to be deep asleep and not ences, with the 8-year-old group also significantly de-
dreaming. One child said: ‘While I am deep asleep nying pretending. Finally, the adult group signifi-
and not dreaming, I am aware that I feel peaceful, cantly denied the occurrence of all eight mental
quiet, calm. I am aware of these feelings while I am states, the more cognitive and affective ones as well as
sleeping.’ The experimenter paused briefly. “The other the more perceptual ones. Thus, the adults’ intuitions
child said: ‘While I am deep asleep and not dreaming. about conscious-unconscious differences tended to be
I am not aware of feeling anything. I am not aware of coincide with our own and with those of most of
any feelings while I am sleeping.’” The experimenter the 20 adult participants in the pilot study. Three of the
paused again. “Which child do you think is more states (wishing, knowing, hearing) showed signifi-
right?” After the participant had responded the ex- cant, p , .05, increases in denial with age by x2 or
perimenter confirmed the choice by repeating the Fisher exact test; another (thinking) showed a near-
critical portion of the chosen statement (“The one significant, p , .10, increase with age.
who said I am not aware of feeling anything?” or “The Summing across all eight questions, the mean per-
one who said I am aware that I feel peaceful, calm and
quiet?”) She then continued, “OK. Why do you think
that child was more right?” Table 1 Percentage of Correct Responses to Main Task Ques-
Ability to make decisions. The experimenter said: tions in Study 1
“When you make decisions about things you are mak- Percentage of Correct Responses
ing choices, aren’t you? Like you can decide what
program you’d like to see on TV or what books you Task Question 5-Year-Olds 7-Year-Olds 8-Year-Olds Adults
want to read. I asked two children about making de-
cisions while they were deep asleep and not dream- Seeing 89* 100* 94* 94*
Wishing 56 50 61 94*
ing. One child said: ‘While I am deep asleep and not Pretending 61 61 83* 89*
dreaming, I can make decisions about things.’ The Know asleep 39 61 72 89*
other child said: ‘While I am deep asleep and not Thinking 44 56 67 83*
dreaming, I can not make decisions about things.’” Listening 61 83* 83* 83*
The experimenter then asked: “Which child do you Hear 44 78* 94* 78*
Feeling sad 56 72 56 78*
think is more right?” After the participant’s choice
was confirmed as before, the experimenter asked why Note: Percentages significantly, p , .03, different from chance ex-
that child was more right. pectation of 50% according to the binomial table are marked with
Knowledge of sleep state. The experimenter said: an asterisk.

centages correct were, from youngest to oldest group,
56%, 70%, 76%, and 86%, with all but the 5-year-olds’
percentage being significantly, p , .05, above chance
by t test. The numbers of participants in each group
responding correctly to at least 7 of the 8 questions
were 4, 9, 8, and 12 from youngest to oldest group, a
near-significant age trend: x2(3, N 5 72) 5 7.33, p ,
.10. A simple analysis of variance (ANOVA) per-
formed upon participants’ total-number-of-ques-
tions-correct scores, range 5 0–8, yielded a significant
age effect, F(3, 68) 5 4.31, p , .01. Subsequent pair-
wise group comparisons by Tukey test showed that
the adults had significantly, p , .01, higher scores
than the 5-year-olds, with all the other pairwise com-
parisons failing to show significant group differences.
In the Awareness, Decision, and Sleep questions
presented at the end of the testing session, the 7- and
8-year-olds were asked whether a person who was
deep asleep and not dreaming would be aware of any
feelings, could make decisions, and would know that
he or she was asleep. Table 2 shows the percentages of
children in each group who correctly answered these
questions in the negative, both as their initial re-
sponse and as their final judgment after attempting to
justify their initial response. As the table indicates,
only 1 of the 12 percentages was significantly higher
than would be expected by chance—namely, the final
judgments of the 8-year-olds about knowledge of
being asleep. The numbers of 7- and 8-year-olds an-
swering all three questions correctly (final judg-
ments) were six and five, respectively—thus, only
about one third of the sample.
A category system was devised to score the 7- and
8-year-olds’ justifications for their correct and incor-
rect responses; this same category system was also
used in Study 2. Two judges scored the three sets of
justifications separately (interjudge agreement for the
three sets ranged from 83% to 89%) and then resolved
any disagreements by discussion. The category of
principal interest was that of at least minimally ade-
Table 2 Percentage of Correct Responses to Additional Task
Questions in Study 1
Percentage of Correct Responses
Task Question 7-Year-Olds 8-Year-Olds
Awareness of feeling states 56 (50) 56 (56)
Ability to make decisions 67 (67) 61 (61)
Knowledge of sleep state 61 (72) 50 (78*)
Note: Percentages significantly, p , .03, different from chance ex-
pectation of 50% according to the binomial table are marked with
an asterisk. Numbers in parentheses reflect children’s final an-
swers following their attempts to justify their initial response.
Flavell et al. 399
quate justifications of correct answers. To illustrate, a
justification of a correct answer would be scored as
adequate if it appealed to the fact that a person’s senses
are shut down when the person is in a dreamless
sleep, or if it made vague or implicit references to the
absence of consciousness or awareness (no child par-
ticipant actually described the person as not being
“conscious” when in that state). The percentages of
7- and 8-year-olds who both answered correctly and
also adequately justified their correct answer accord-
ing to our fairly generous criteria were, respectively,
28% and 6% for the Awareness question, 39% and
50% for the Decision question, and 44% and 33% for
the Sleep question. Although these percentages and
those in Table 2 are not very high, a few responses tes-
tified to a quite good understanding of what things
are like when one is deeply asleep. These are among
the best examples: “It’s just like you are dead except
you come back to life in the morning.” “When you are
[asleep but] not dreaming you don’t really have any-
thing in your brain so you can’t make a decision.”
“You do not know you are in your bed or that your
eyes are closed because you are sleeping.”
Finally, for each of these two groups the numbers
of participants’ correct answers in the main task were
correlated with those in the additional task (initial an-
swers only). The consistency proved to be quite high
for the 7-year-olds, r(17) 5 .69, but not for the 8-year-
olds, r(17) 5 .21.
STUDY 2
Farthing (1992) makes the following interesting dis-
tinction between primary consciousness and reflective
consciousness:
Reflective consciousness consists of thoughts about one’s
own conscious experiences per se. In primary conscious-
ness you are the subject who does the thinking, feeling,
and acting in regard, mainly, to external objects and
events. But in reflective consciousness your own con-
scious experiences—percepts, thoughts, feelings, and
actions—are the objects of your thoughts. Thus, in pri-
mary consciousness you might perceive an event . . . and
have thoughts about that event. But in reflective con-
sciousness you might have thoughts not about the event
itself, but about your thoughts concerning that event (Far-
thing, 1992, p. 13).
Variations on this distinction are often encountered in
philosophical discussions of consciousness (e.g.,
Rosenthal, 1993). A few of the test items in Study 1 as-
sessed children’s knowledge about reflective con-
sciousness, notably the know-asleep questions in the
main and additional tasks and the awareness-of-
feelings question in the additional tasks. However,
400 Child Development
the majority tested their knowledge only about pri-
mary consciousness, for example, about whether the
story character saw, heard, and thought about various
external objects or events while asleep.
Accordingly, one purpose of Study 2 was to obtain
more and better evidence concerning children’s knowl-
edge about consciousness of this more metacognitive
reflective type. We tried to do this in several tasks by
first asking participants about the presence or ab-
sence of a particular example of primary conscious-
ness in a sleeping story character and then asking
them about the presence or absence of reflective con-
sciousness concerning that same example. In one task
(Hear), for example, participants first were asked
whether a deeply sleeping story character heard
the rain that was beating against his bedroom win-
dow (primary consciousness). Then, depending upon
whether they answered this question in the affirma-
tive or in the negative, they either were asked if the
character knows he is hearing it or if he knows he is
not hearing it (reflective consciousness). We hoped
that this two-stage questioning procedure would
make it clearer to the participants that the second,
reflective-consciousness question concerned the char-
acter’s awareness-nonawareness of his own psycho-
logical activity (or lack thereof) rather than the mere
presence-absence of the activity itself.
A second purpose of Study 2 was to assess children’s
understanding that not only are nondreaming sleepers
not consciously aware of the presence or absence of ob-
jects, events, and activities, they are also unable to con-
sciously and deliberately initiate or change activities or
otherwise try to exert control over them. As noted in the
introduction, although a person may be able to do some
things while in an unconscious state, the person is not
only unaware of doing them but also—and for that
very reason—incapable of deliberately deciding to do
them or refrain from doing them. Although one of the
additional task questions in Study 1 tested for this latter
understanding of control (the Decision question), it was
assessed more thoroughly in Study 2.
Finally, in addition to tests of knowledge concern-
ing the possibility of reflective consciousness and
control-of-activity when in a dreamless sleep, we also
included tasks designed to assess knowledge con-
cerning primary consciousness plus a task question
(Notice) that could be interpreted as referring either
to primary or to reflective consciousness.
Method
Participants
Three groups of children and one group of adults
were tested, with 18 participants in each group. The
children were of mean age 6, 8, and 10 years and were
drawn from the first, third, and fifth grades of a local
elementary school. The 6-year-old group consisted of
6 girls and 12 boys (mean age in years and months 5
6,5, range 5 5,11–6,10). The (mostly) 8-year-old group
consisted of 9 girls and 9 boys (mean age 5 8,6,
range 5 7,10–9,4). The (mostly) 10-year-old group
consisted of 11 girls and 7 boys (mean age 5 10,7,
range 5 10,1–11,7). The adults were 15 female and 3
male college students. The participants were from
primarily upper middle class families and were mostly
Caucasian and Asian. The same female experimenter
(E1), assisted by a second female experimenter (E2),
tested all participants.
Procedure
Pretraining. Because the term know has several dif-
ferent meanings, the first experimenter (E1) began the
testing session by trying to restrict participants’ inter-
pretation of the term to that of a person’s present
awareness of ongoing mental and physical events.
She did this by providing a variety of examples of
things she presently “knew,” e.g., that she was feeling
happy (mental event) and that the participant was sit-
ting there (physical event). Then she asked the partic-
ipants a series of questions similar to those they
would be asked during subsequent testing and she
supplied the correct answer if they erred. For exam-
ple, she asked the second experimenter (E2) to face
away from her, held up three fingers and told E2 that
she was doing that, and then asked the participants
whether E2 sees her fingers right now (correct an-
swer: no) and then whether E2 knows she does not
see them (correct answer: yes). They were also asked
similar questions about situations in which (1) E2 sees
something and knows she sees it, (2) knows that a cer-
tain object she cannot see is behind her, and (3) does
not know that a certain object is not behind her (she
knew it was there previously but does not know it is
no longer there). Eight 6-year-olds, two 8-year-olds,
and two adults responded incorrectly to at least one
of these four know questions and received corrective
feedback. These participants were then questioned
about another situation similar to (3). All of them an-
swered all of these additional questions correctly.
The testing then began with the following pre-
amble: “I want to explain something about what hap-
pens when you are deep asleep at night. Part of the
time when you are deep asleep you dream about
things, and part of the time you don’t do any dream-
ing at all. I am going to ask you only about those
times when people are deep asleep and not dream-
ing.” The first three tasks—Think, Hear, and Act—

were then presented in counterbalanced order. In
the Think and Hear tasks E1 first asked a primary-
consciousness question about whether a person who
was deep asleep and not dreaming could be thinking
about something (in the Think task) or would have
heard something (in the Hear task). In each of these
tasks she then asked a reflective-consciousness ques-
tion followed by a control-of-activity question. In the
Act task she asked only a reflective-consciousness
question followed by a control-of-activity question.
Think. E1 displayed a line drawing of a sleeping
girl and said: “Here is a little girl named Anna. She is
deep asleep and not dreaming. Here is the first ques-
tion. She is still asleep and not dreaming. Could she
be thinking about something—like could she be
thinking about her toys?” E1 then repeated which-
ever answer the participant gave in a matter-of-fact
tone: “She can (cannot) be thinking about that, okay.”
If the participant had said she could be thinking
about the toys the next two questions were as follows:
“You decided she could be thinking about something,
like maybe her toys. Here is a question about what
Anna knows right now. She is still asleep and not
dreaming. Does she know she is thinking about her
toys?” After repeating the participant’s answer to this
knowledge question, E1 continued with the control-
of-activity question: “Here is one more question. She
is still asleep and not dreaming. Can she think to her-
self ‘Hmm. I am going to start thinking about my
friends instead of my toys now’?” If the participant
had initially said that Anna could not be thinking, the
ensuing test procedure was identical to that above ex-
cept that the knowledge question became “Does she
know she is not thinking about anything?” and the
subsequent control-of-activity question became “Can
she think to herself ‘Hmm. I am going to start thinking
about my toys now’?”
Hear. The procedure for this task was essentially
the same as that for the Think task. Participants were
shown a picture of a sleeping boy with rain streaks on
his bedroom window. E1 said: “Here is a child named
Larry. He is deep asleep and not dreaming. Just a sec-
ond ago, while he was asleep, a big storm started out-
side. The wind is howling and blowing the rain
against his window. Pitter pat, pitter pat.” The first
question was “Does he hear the rain?” The knowl-
edge question was then either “Does he know he is
hearing the rain?” or “Does he know he is not hearing
the rain?” The control-of-activity question then be-
came either “Can he think to himself ‘Hmm. I am go-
ing to start listening to the wind instead of the rain
now’?” if the answer to the hear question was affir-
mative, or “Can he think to himself, ‘Hmm, I am going
to start listening to the rain now’?” if the answer was
Flavell et al. 401
negative. We recognized that some of the Think and
Hear questions ended up being rather odd (e.g.,
“Does he know he is not hearing the rain?”), but could
not think of a better way to make salient the differ-
ence between mental activities (primary conscious-
ness) and awareness and conscious control of those
mental activities (reflective consciousness and con-
trol-of-activity). Recall also that the Pretraining was
designed to familiarize the children with such ques-
tion forms, at least a little.
Act. In this task E1 began by saying: “Here is a
child named Mark. He is deep asleep and not dream-
ing. Just a second ago, while he was sleeping, he
moved his body. He was sleeping on his back but he
rolled over and now he is sleeping on his side.” Then,
after the usual reminder that the child was still asleep
and not dreaming, the knowledge question was
“Does he know that he rolled over?” and the control-
of-activity question was “Can he think to himself
‘Hmm. I am going to roll over again’?”
The remaining tasks were then given in the order
listed. E1 introduced them by saying: “Now I have
some questions to ask you, about when you are deep
asleep and not dreaming.”
Asleep. “Suppose you are very tired. Almost as
soon as you get in bed you fall asleep. You have been
deep asleep and not dreaming for about an hour. While
you are like that, do you know that you are asleep?”
See. “While you are awake and your eyes are
closed, you see black or dark gray. Suppose you have
been deep asleep for about an hour. You are not
dreaming and your eyes are closed. While you are
like that, do you see black or dark gray or do you not
see anything at all?” (The order of choices within the
question was unsystematically varied.) E1 then
asked: “While you are deep asleep and not dreaming,
do you know that you see black or dark gray (you
don’t see anything)?”
Try. “While you are deep asleep and not dream-
ing, can you try to think about something, and do it,
on purpose?”
Notice. “While you are awake, even with your eyes
closed, you can notice and know about all sorts of
things that are happening around you and inside you.
You can notice that you are feeling happy and you can
know that you are thinking about going out to play
(seeing some friends). You can pay attention to smells
coming from the kitchen and figure out what you are
having for dinner—things like that. How about while
you are deep asleep and not dreaming? Can you no-
tice or pay attention to anything while you are that
way?” If the response was “yes”, E1 asked “What
kinds of things can you notice or pay attention to?” If
the response was “no”, E1 asked “Why not?”
402 Child Development

Asleep justification. E1 reminded the participants Table 3 Percentage of Correct Responses to Task Questions in
of their responses to the Asleep question by saying: Study 2
“You decided that when you have been deep asleep Percentage of Correct Responses
and not dreaming for about an hour, you know (do not
know) that you are asleep.” Next she asked either 6- 8- 10-
“How do you know that?” or “Why don’t you know Year- Year- Year-
Task Question Olds Olds Olds Adults
that?” As some participants responded to this ques-
tion, it became clear to E1 that they had misunder- Reflective consciousness
stood the Asleep question. For example, some partic- Think 61 56 67 78*
ipants described how they knew they were about to Hear 44 72 78* 83*
go to sleep or how they knew they had been asleep, Act 72 78* 100* 89*
rather than how they knew they were asleep. In such See 22* 83* 61 72
Asleep 39 78* 67 94*
instances, E2 repeated what they had just said, but Asleep: adequate
also repeated the test question in abbreviated form: justification 6 50 50 89*
“Well, how about when you are deep asleep and not Control-of-activity
dreaming for about an hour. While you are like that, Think 56 50 72 83*
do you know you are asleep?” Following such ques- Hear 72 72 89* 89*
tion clarification a number of participants changed Act 61 78* 89* 89*
Try 56 67 78* 83*
their responses. Additionally, some participants
changed their initial responses spontaneously, as they Primary consciousness
Think 39 50 56 61
thought about the question further. Accordingly, only Hear 50 72 72 44
a participant’s final, considered response to the See 22* 61 50 83*
Asleep question was used in subsequent data analy- Notice 67 89* 83* 72
ses; the same was true of the Notice question. Notice: adequate
The adequacy of participants’ justifications of their justification 33 72 56 72
answers to the Notice and Asleep questions was as-
Note: Percentages significantly, p , .03, different from chance ex-
sessed by two judges using the same scoring systems pectation of 50% according to the binomial table are marked with
employed in Study 1. As in that study, the few inter- an asterisk, with the exception of the two sets of adequate justifica-
judge disagreements that occurred were resolved tion percentages.
by discussion.

and not dreaming would be engaging in the mental

Results
The Think, Hear, Act, See, and Asleep tasks each
contained a knowledge question designed to test par-
ticipants’ understanding about reflective conscious-
ness. (Although the knowledge question in the Act
task concerned awareness of a physical rather than a
mental action—namely, rolling over in bed—it seemed
to test much the same sort of knowledge as the other
four questions.) Likewise, the Think, Hear, Act, and
Try tasks each contained a question about conscious
control-of-activity. Finally, the Think, Hear, and See
tasks each began with a question about primary con-
sciousness. Although it was possible to construe the
Notice question as a reflective-consciousness one, as
noted, almost all the participants seemed to construe
it as a primary-consciousness one concerning atten-
tion to external events. Consequently, we have grouped
it with the other three primary-consciousness ques-
tions for purposes of data analysis. Table 3 shows the
percentages of participants in each age group who an-
swered each of these 13 questions in the negative,
thereby denying that a person who was sound asleep
activity in question.
Considering first the questions about reflective
consciousness, Table 3 shows that as a group the 6-
year-olds evinced no significant tendency to deny
knowledge of the presence or absence of any of the
five activities or states queried. In fact, they showed a
significant tendency to assert such knowledge on the
See task (78%) rather than deny it (22%). Thus, a good
number of them variously said that while sleeping a
person would know that he or she was (or was not)
thinking, hearing, acting physically, seeing, and in a
sleep state. In contrast, the 8-year-olds tended signif-
icantly to deny such awareness in the case of acting,
seeing, and asleep, the 10-year-olds did the same for
hearing and acting, and the adults did so for thinking,
hearing, acting, and asleep. Summing across all five
questions, the mean percentages correct were, from
youngest to oldest group, 48%, 73%, 74%, and 83%,
with all but 6-year-olds’ percentage significantly (p ,
.05) above chance by t test. The numbers of partici-
pants in each group responding correctly to at least 4
of the 5 reflective-consciousness questions were 5, 10,

10, and 15 from youngest to oldest group, a signifi-
cant age trend: x2(3, N 5 72) 5 11.25, p , .02. A simple
ANOVA performed upon participants’ total-questions-
correct scores here (range 5 0–5) also yielded a signif-
icant age effect, F(3, 68) 5 5.10, p , .01. Subsequent
pairwise group comparisons by Tukey tests showed
that each of the three older groups had significantly,
p , .01, higher scores than the 6-year-olds, with none
of the other pairwise comparisons yielding signifi-
cant group differences.
The results for the four questions dealing with a
conscious control of one’s activities when asleep were
similar, but with weaker age trends. Again, the 6-
year-olds were not significantly above chance on any
of the four questions, whereas the 8-year-olds were
on the Act question, the 10-year-olds were on the
Hear, Act, and Try questions, and the adults were on
all four questions. Summing across all four questions,
the mean percentages correct were, from youngest to
oldest group, 61%, 67%, 82%, and 86%, with only the
two oldest groups’ percentages significantly, p , .05,
above chance by t test. The number of participants in
each group answering at least 3 of the 4 control-of-
activity questions correctly were 10, 11, 15, and 16
from youngest to oldest group, a near-significant age
trend: x2(3, N 5 72) 5 7.20, p , .10. A simple ANOVA
performed on total scores (range 5 0–4) also yielded
only a near-significant age trend, F(3, 68) 5 2.12, p , .11.
The age trends were less consistent from question
to question in the case of the four primary-conscious-
ness questions. Once again, the youngest children
were not significantly above chance on any of the
questions; in fact, they were significantly below
chance on the See question, tending to say that they
see black or dark gray rather than nothing when
sound asleep. The 8- and 10-year-olds were above
chance only on the Notice question and the adults
were above chance only on the See question. The
adults’ relatively low percentages of negative an-
swers to the Hear and Notice questions clearly under-
estimated their knowledge, however. Four correctly
pointed out that a sleeper would hear a sound if it
were loud enough. Another adult said that whether
the sleeper could be said to hear “sort of depends on
what hear means”; yet another said that “somehow
the sound is entering the ear”. On the See question,
where there was no potentially compelling external
stimulus, most of them said that a sleeper would see
nothing rather than black or dark gray. Their rela-
tively low percentage on the Think question is less
easily explained. The different wording of the ques-
tion (“Could she be thinking . . . ?” here versus “Is
she still thinking . . . ?” in Study 1) may have been
partly responsible. Summing across all four primary-
Flavell et al. 403
consciousness questions, the mean percentages cor-
rect were, from youngest to oldest group, 40%, 68%,
65%, and 65%, with only the two middle groups’ per-
centages significantly, p , .05, above chance by t test
(the adults’ percentage approached significance—
namely, p , .10). The numbers of participants in
each group responding negatively to at least three of
the four primary-consciousness questions were 5, 8,
10, and 11 in order of increasing age, a nonsignificant
trend. In contrast, a simple ANOVA performed on
total scores (range 5 0–4) did yield a significant age
trend, F(3, 68) 5 3.60, p , .02. Tukey tests revealed
that the 10-year-olds had significantly, p , .05, higher
scores than the 6-year-olds, with none of the other
pairwise group comparisons being significant.
As to justifications of correct responses, Table 3
shows a marked increase with age in adequate justi-
fications for negative response to the Asleep ques-
tion: x2(3, N 5 72) 5 25.08, p , .001. There was also a
near-significant increase with age in adequate No-
tice response justifications, comprised mainly of a
difference between the 6-year-olds and the three
older groups: x2(3, N 5 72) 5 7.54, p , .10. We also
scored these two sets of adequate justifications for ex-
plicit mention of the words conscious, aware, and their
derivatives (e.g., unaware). The percentages of partic-
ipants using any of these terms at least once in the
two sets of justifications were, from youngest to old-
est group, 0%, 11%, 11%, and 67%, significant at p ,
.001 by Fisher exact test. In general, the adults tended
to refer in their justifications to the absence of think-
ing or consciousness in a sleeping person rather than
to the absence of perception of external events,
whereas the children did not show this tendency.
One might expect that participants’ responses to
the control-of-activity questions would be similar
to their responses to the reflective-consciousness
questions because the control-of-activity questions
also referred to conscious reflection on one’s own fu-
ture activities (e.g., “Can she think to herself ‘Hmm.
I’m going to start thinking about my toys now’?”).
This proved to be the case for each group except, for
unknown reasons, the 10-year-olds. The correlations
between participants’ responses to the five reflective-
consciousness questions and the four control-of-
activity questions were .52, .73, 2.22, and .87, from
the youngest to the oldest group. The corresponding
correlations for the Think, Hear, and Act reflective-
consciousness and control questions above were .47,
.85, .19, and .81. There were also associations between
responses to the initial primary-consciousness response
and to the ensuing reflective-consciousness questions
in the Think and See tasks. In the Think task partici-
pants were more likely to say that the girl does not
404 Child Development
know she is not thinking, given a previous assertion
that she could not be thinking (84%), than to say that
she does not know she is thinking, given a previous
assertion that she could be thinking (46%). The com-
parable percentages in the See task were 77% and
39%. No such association was observed in the Hear
task, however: not know responses were about equally
likely to follow either hear or not hear responses.
Some of our primary-consciousness questions were
arguably less valid than our reflective-consciousness
and control questions as measures of a person’s un-
derstanding of what can and cannot happen in a state
of dreamless sleep. Perhaps there could be thinking
on some unconscious level while in this state. Perhaps
there could also be some hearing and even noticing of
a low-level, nonconscious kind. Some of the adult
participants seemed to take this view of things, and in
retrospect it seems a reasonable one. Thus, it seems
quite plausible to think that a participant who has a
perfectly adequate layperson understanding of con-
sciousness and unconsciousness might respond af-
firmatively to the Think, Hear, and Notice primary-
consciousness questions—construing them, in effect,
as questions about nonconscious rather than primary
consciousness processes (see Study 4). On the other
hand, it is hard to make a similar argument for affir-
mative answers to the five reflective-consciousness
questions, the four control-of-activity questions, and
the See question. It strains credibility to argue that
people who are sound asleep and not dreaming can be
consciously aware of what they are and are not doing
(reflective-consciousness questions), can consciously
decide or try to do something (control-of-activity
questions), and are seeing black or dark rather than
not seeing anything at all (See question). Accordingly,
it seemed reasonable to take the sum of each partici-
pant’s correct (i.e., negative) answers to these 10 ques-
tions as an overall index of that participant’s under-
standing of consciousness and unconsciousness. The
mean percentages of these questions correctly an-
swered were, from youngest to oldest group, 50%,
69%, 75%, and 84%, with only the last three percent-
ages significantly, p , .05, above chance by t test. The
numbers of participants in each group who answered
at least 8 of these 10 questions correctly were 5, 10, 8,
and 15, from youngest to oldest group, a significant
age increase, x2(3, N 5 72) 5 11.81, p , .01. The corre-
sponding numbers answering at least 9 of the 10 cor-
rectly were 3, 7, 6, and 13, x2(3, N 5 72) 5 12.18, p ,
.01. A simple ANOVA performed on participants’ to-
tal-questions-correct here (range 5 0–10) also yielded
a significant age effect: F(3, 68) 5 5.30, p , .002.
It should also be noted that there were individual
differences in understanding at each age level as well
as an overall developmental increase in understand-
ing. To illustrate, one adult participant responded in-
correctly to all 10 of these questions. In contrast, one
6-year-old got them all right (the only 6-year-old to do
so) and also gave an adequate justification for her
negative answer to the Asleep question: “Because
your eyes are closed and your brain is shut down, be-
cause you’re asleep.” It was clear from their answers
and answer justifications that at least some of the 8-
and 10-year-olds really did understand that the men-
tal processes specified in these questions are not oper-
ative in a deeply sleeping individual. Here are some
of the justifications that seemed to reflect genuine un-
derstanding: “When you go to sleep you just cut off
everything . . . everything is cut off.” “It’s kind of hard
to explain but when you are sleeping it’s kind of like
there’s no you, and no one is there . . . you are in your
own world of darkness.” “It’s sort of like you are
knocked out.” “I know when I’m going to fall asleep
but not when I’m asleep.” “It is sort of like I am sort of
gone for a while.” In contrast, some of the other 8- and
10-year-olds, together with most of the 6-year-olds,
failed to demonstrate such understanding. At the
same time, there was no clear evidence that the major-
ity of the younger participants had a strong, positive
theory that unconscious people could and would def-
initely have these mental states. For example, just as
only one 6-year-old got all 10 questions right, so also
did only one get them all wrong. Rather, the distribu-
tion of correct answers over participants in this
youngest group was essentially flat, suggesting that
most 6-year-olds had no fixed convictions one way or
the other.
STUDY 3
The 5-year-olds in Study 1 and the 6-year-olds in
Study 2 gave no evidence of knowing that conscious
mental activities are necessarily absent in a sleeping
person who is not dreaming. Nevertheless, it is pos-
sible that children of this age possess a useful devel-
opmental precursor of that knowledge, namely, the
belief that a conscious person is at least more likely
than an unconscious one to be engaging in such ac-
tivities. The purpose of Study 3 was to test this pos-
sibility. In this study, an experimenter showed 6-
year-old participants pictures of a child who was
wide awake and a child who was in a deep, dream-
less sleep, stated that one of the two was engaged in
a certain mental activity, and asked the participants
which child was doing that. The mental activities
tested for consisted of primary-consciousness type
perceptions and thoughts (listening, smelling, won-
dering) and reflective-consciousness type self-

reflections (consciously thinking to oneself that one
likes something or feels a certain way). At the end of
the session the participants were queried further
about three of their correct answers. That is, they
were asked whether the sleeping child could also be
doing a mental activity they had just correctly attrib-
uted to the waking child. We predicted that the partici-
pants would perform well on the main questions,
which merely tested their knowledge that a conscious
person would be likelier than an unconscious one to be
perceiving, thinking, and self-reflecting, but poorly on
these follow-up questions, which tested their knowl-
edge that an unconscious person would be, not just less
likely to do these things, but actually unable to do them.
Method
Participants
The participants were 20 first-graders, 12 girls and
8 boys (mean age in years and months 5 6,8, range 5
6,1 to 7,0). They were from primarily upper-middle-
class families, and were mostly Caucasian and Asian.
The same female experimenter tested all participants.
Procedure
The experimenter began by establishing that the
participants knew that people sometimes snore when
they sleep (all but one child did) and by explaining
that sometimes people dream when they are asleep
and sometimes they do not. She then showed them
pictures of two children lying face up in bed, one with
eyes closed and one with eyes wide open; they were
both portrayed as girls for female participants and as
boys for male participants. The experimenter said
that the first child was sound asleep and not dream-
ing and that the second was wide awake, and then
verified that the participants knew which was which.
Then she asked a series of nine questions of the form:
“Right now, one of these girls (boys) is ____. Can you
show me which one is ____? There were six primary-
consciousness questions, two reflective-conscious-
ness questions, and one question about snoring. The
primary-consciousness questions asked which child
was listening to A, smelling B, not listening to C, won-
dering about D, wondering about E, and not wonder-
ing about F. For example: “Right now, one of these
girls is not wondering what is for dinner. Which girl is
not wondering about dinner?” The snoring question
and the two negatively worded questions were in-
cluded so that the sleeping child would occasionally
be the correct choice. The reflective-consciousness
questions concerned the child’s conscious reflections
Flavell et al. 405
about her current state and were worded as follows:
“Right now, which one of the girls is thinking to
herself—‘Hey, I like lying here in bed/Hey, I’m start-
ing to feel a little warm’?” The questions were pre-
sented in a random order with the exception that the
snoring question always came second, the not-listening
question fifth, and the not-wondering question eighth.
Three follow-up questions were presented in fixed
order to conclude the testing session. The first was
about wondering, the second about listening, and the
third about self-reflection. To illustrate, the wonder-
ing follow-up question was: “Remember you said
that ____ was wondering about his little dog in the
backyard? Do you think that ____ (the other child)
could also be wondering about something while he is
sleeping?” (The “while he is sleeping” phrase was of
course added only if the participant had correctly
nominated the waking child initially as the one who
was wondering.)
Results
The results confirmed both predictions. Consistent
with the first prediction, the children performed quite
well on the eight initial mental-activity questions.
Percentages of children responding correctly to each
question ranged from 70% for the lying-in-bed reflec-
tive-consciousness question to 100% for the listening
question, with all the percentages except the former
being significantly (p , .05, binomial) higher than
would be expected by chance. They as readily picked
the sleeping child as the one not listening (95%) and
not wondering (85%) as they picked the waking child
as the one listening (100%) and wondering (80%);
identifying the former as the snorer was also easy
(95%). Of the 20 participants, 16 were correct on at
least 6 of the 8 questions and 9 were correct on all 8.
Consistent with the second prediction, the group
did not perform better than would be expected by
chance on the three follow-up questions. Of the 16
children who had initially said correctly that the wak-
ing child would be the one who was wondering, only
8 went on to say correctly that the sleeping child could
not also be wondering. The corresponding figures for
the listening question were 20 and 11, and for the
reflective-consciousness question they were 14 and 7.
STUDY 4
In the previous three studies children were often
quite willing to attribute various forms of conscious
cognition to a deeply sleeping, nondreaming person.
However, the sleeping person was always portrayed
in a static drawing rather than appearing live. One
406 Child Development
purpose of the present study was to find out whether
children would be equally willing to attribute con-
scious thought to a real (videotaped) person who ap-
peared to be sound asleep and was described as being
so by the experimenter. It seemed possible that actu-
ally seeing a video of a real person looking thor-
oughly comatose would inhibit such attributions.
A second purpose of this study was to assess un-
derstanding of levels of consciousness. More specifi-
cally, we wanted to find out how sensitive partici-
pants of different ages would be to the distinction
between a low level, essentially nonconscious detec-
tion of a stimulus event and a fully conscious aware-
ness of it, an awareness that would permit a present
conscious thought about it and a later recollection of
its occurrence.
Recall that in Study 2 some of the adult partici-
pants alluded to the possibility of nonconscious cog-
nition in their justifications. The data on the reflective-
consciousness Hear question in that study also hinted
at an increase with age in sensitivity to this distinc-
tion. Similarly, Flavell, Green, and Flavell (1995b) found
that older children were more aware than younger
ones that a stimulus could be seen but not attended to
or thought about (see also Pillow & Lovett, 1998).
To address these questions, 5-year-olds, 8-year-
olds, and adults were shown a videotape of a young
teenager lying on a bed, apparently sound asleep. His
sister mischievously tickles his nose with a feather,
causing his nose to twitch, but he does not wake up.
The participants were then asked three questions: (1)
if the sleeper “sort of felt” the tickling, (2) if, when it
happened, he had the thought that “someone is tick-
ling my nose right now”, and (3) if, when he wakes
up, he will remember that his nose had been tickled.
Method
Participants
The participants were kindergartners, third graders,
and adults, 10 of each sex in each group. The children
were drawn from local elementary schools. The mean
age in years and months of the younger children was
5,9 (range 5,2–6,5). The mean age of the older children
was 8,9 (range 8,1–9,5). The adults were college stu-
dents. The participants were mainly from upper-mid-
dle-class families, and were mostly Caucasian and
Asian. One experimenter tested all the participants.
Procedure
The experimenter began by saying: “I am going to
show you a videotape of a boy named Mike and then
I’ll ask you a few questions. Mike was very, very tired
when he went to bed. He’s deep asleep right now.
He’s not even dreaming (starts the tape and freeze-
frames it with a close-up of the boy’s face). So is he
deep asleep right now? (All participants said he was.)
That’s right, he’s sound asleep and not dreaming. I’ll
tell you what’s going to happen. His sister decides to
play a trick on him. She’s going to tickle his nose with
a big feather. His nose is going to wiggle but he won’t
wake up (starts tape again and stops it 2–3 s after the
tickle). His nose wiggled but he did not wake up. Let’s
look at that film again. I’ll stop it here (scene showing
the tickling). Remember, when Mike was tickled his
nose wiggled, but he didn’t wake up. So, did he wake
up? (All participants said he did not.) That’s right, he
didn’t.” Thus, each participant had the experience of
giving a positive answer to one question and a nega-
tive answer to a second before the test questions were
asked. The experimenter then asked the three test ques-
tions, always in the following order:
Feel. “While his sister is tickling him and his nose
is wiggling, does he sort of feel the tickling?”
Think. “While his sister is tickling him and his
nose is wiggling, is he thinking to himself ‘Hey, I think
someone is tickling my nose right now’?”
Remember. “When he wakes up in the morning
will he remember that his nose was tickled?”
Half the participants in each group received the
task just described first and another, very similar task
second; in this other task, a sleeping girl stirs without
awakening when her father lightly brushes her hair
away from her eyes. The remaining participants expe-
rienced the two tasks in the opposite order. At the end
of whichever task they were given second, partici-
pants’ answers to each of that task’s three key ques-
tions were repeated and participants were asked why
they answered as they did, e.g., “Why won’t he re-
member that?”
The session concluded with a third task similar to
the two main ones, except that the sleeping individ-
ual showed no response at all when lightly tickled
(and the experimenter called attention to his lack of
response) and only the Feel question plus its follow-
up “Why” question were asked.
Results
The top three rows of Table 4 show the percentages
of correct answers in each age group to the Feel (“yes”
answers), Think (“no” answers), and Remember (“no”
answers) questions of the first two tasks, in which the
sleeping child in the videotape stirred slightly in re-
sponse to a touch but did not wake up. The bottom
row shows the percentages of “no” answers to the
Feel questions of the third task, in which the sleeper

Table 4 Percentage of Correct Responses to Task Questions in
Study 4
Percentage of Correct Responses
Task Question 5-Year-Olds 8-Year-Olds Adults
Feel 78* 85* 95*
Think 45 48 100*
Remember 53 90* 100*
Feel—no movement 60 20* 40
Note: Percentages significantly, p , .02, different from chance ex-
pectation of 50% by t test are marked with an asterisk. Percentages
of affirmative answers are entered in the bottom row, not because
they are regarded as correct but in order to facilitate comparison
with the affirmative (correct) answers presented in the top row.
showed no reaction at all to the touch; unlike the case
with the previous three questions, no claim is made
that a negative answer to this question is clearly right
and a positive one clearly wrong. An age (5-year-olds
versus 8-year-olds versus adults) 3 question (Feel
versus Think versus Remember) mixed ANOVA was
performed on the responses given in the first two
tasks. Task and task order were not included in this
analysis because it was evident from inspection that
these variables had no significant effects on participants’
responses. Significant main effects were found for age,
F(2, 57) 5 28.84, p , .001, and for question, F(2, 114) 5
6.22, p , .001; the interaction between age and ques-
tion was also significant, F(4, 114) 5 3.64, p , .01.
These data show a clear pattern of developmental
changes. Participants in all three age groups tended to
say that the person on the videotape did “sort of feel”
the touch when he or she stirred in response (Feel
questions). The older participants, particularly, were
much less likely to draw this conclusion when, in the
third task, the person did not show any response to
the touch (Feel—no movement questions). This sug-
gests that the movement was taken by many as a
strong cue; participants’ justification of their answers
also confirmed this conclusion, as will be shown. In
contrast, the three groups responded differently to
the Think and Remember questions. Only 7 of the 20
5-year-olds correctly denied on both tasks that the
sleeping person was having the very conscious-
sounding, verbalized thought that he or she was
being tickled, and only four more denied it on one of
the two tasks. Similarly, the corresponding figures in
this group for the Remember question were eight
(two denials) and five (one denial). The 8-year-olds re-
sponded to the Think questions much as the 5-year-
olds did: eight responded correctly on both tasks and
three did so on one task. Unlike the 5-year-olds, how-
Flavell et al. 407
ever, they usually denied that the person would re-
member having been touched or tickled the next
morning, when he or she woke up: 17 denied this on
both tasks and 2 denied it on one. Finally, as Table 4
shows, all of the adults denied the sleeper both the
present thought and the later memory on both tasks.
If we take fully correct performance on these two
tasks to consist of affirmative answers to both Feel
questions and negative answers to both Think and
both Remember questions, then the numbers of 5-
year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults who were fully cor-
rect were 2, 5, and 19, respectively, x2(2, N 5 60) 5
33.53, p , .001. Five 5-year-olds and one 8-year-old
said yes in response to all six questions, and three 5-
year-olds, one 8-year-old, and one adult answered no
to all of them; all of the other participants answered
yes to some questions and no to others.
A category system was devised to analyze partici-
pants’ justifications of their answers to the Feel,
Think, Remember, and Feel—no movement ques-
tions. Two judges scored each justification. Interjudge
agreement ranged from 85% for the Remember ques-
tions to 97% for the Feel questions; disagreements
were subsequently resolved by discussion. Consis-
tent with the data in the top and bottom rows of Table
4, the older participants, especially, were apt to justify
their answers to the questions about feeling by citing
the sleeper’s physical response (Feel questions) or
lack of response (Feel—no movement).
The category system also allowed us to code for
possible indications of some understanding of con-
sciousness, unconsciousness, or levels of conscious-
ness. We used both a liberal and a conservative crite-
rion here. In the liberal scoring, a justification was
counted if it even hinted at some possible under-
standing. An example is this 5-year-old’s justification
of a negative answer to the Think question: “No, she
doesn’t know it.” To be counted in the more conserva-
tive scoring, a justification had to be more explicit or
to make a generalization of some kind regarding con-
sciousness or the lack thereof. For instance, this justi-
fication for a negative Think answer by an 8-year-old
was counted in this subcategory: “No, because she’s
asleep and when you are asleep you don’t really think
anything because your mind sort of shuts off.” Six 5-
year-olds, 11 8-year-olds, and 20 adults gave at least
one justification that met the liberal criterion, x2(2, N 5
60) 5 21.30, p , .001. The corresponding figures for
the conservative criterion were 0, 8, and 19, x2(2, N 5
60) 5 36.77, p , .001.
Of the 19 adults meeting this more conservative
criterion, 17 gave clear evidence of drawing a distinc-
tion between lower and higher levels of conscious-
ness or attention. Here are some examples: “She feels
408 Child Development
it and responds to it although she may not cognitively
feel it—‘consciously’ is the word I was looking for.”
“He must feel it because he reacted . . . I don’t think
his brain is working to that level to where he can say
‘Oh, wow, I must be being tickled’ because if he was
he’d be aware that he’s being tickled and then he
wouldn’t be asleep.” “Maybe at a subconscious level
but not at a conscious level.” “At some level he had
to feel it.” “He senses something—maybe uncon-
sciously.” “Because I think she feels it on a subcon-
scious level, but not on a conscious level because she
is asleep.” “I don’t know if you mean feeling it and
being conscious of the fact that he’s feeling it.” In ad-
dition, many of the adults used the words conscious,
unconscious, subconscious, and aware when explaining
their answers, whereas no child participant ever used
any of these terms. Recall that this same developmen-
tal trend was observed in studies 1 and 2.
This study showed that many children are indeed
willing to attribute conscious-sounding thoughts to
an unconscious person even when the person is shown
“live” (via videotape) rather than in a drawing, clearly
looks and acts asleep, and is repeatedly described by
the experimenter as being in and remaining in that
state. This was true of the 8-year-olds as well as the 5-
year-olds. One could not argue, in their case, that they
were just carelessly saying “yes” to any mental state
attribution question, because they usually said “no”
to the memory questions. We suspect that the 8-year-
olds, at least, might have been somewhat less inclined
to make the thought attribution if the person had not
just stirred in response to the touch suggesting that he
or she had “sort of felt” it. It should be noted, how-
ever, that the adults also thought that the person “sort
of felt” it, but never concluded from this that the per-
son was having a conscious thought about it. Recall
also that the 8-year-old in studies 1 and 2 were like-
wise more willing than the adults to make mental
state attributions to sleeping, nondreaming individu-
als, although less so than the 5- and 6-year-olds. What
many of the 5- and 8-year-olds in the present study
seem to have failed to do was to distinguish between
two markedly different levels of awareness or atten-
tion: a low-level, subconscious sensing of a tactile
stimulus and a fully conscious awareness of its pres-
ence and its identity.
Finally, the developmental lag found between de-
nial of memory (8-year-olds) and denial of thought
(adults) seems plausible to us: People have more fre-
quent and more direct evidence that they cannot
later recall events that happened while they were
asleep than that they had no conscious thoughts
about them at the time they occurred. Consequently,
it makes sense that children would acquire the
former insight at an earlier age than they would ac-
quire the latter.
DISCUSSION
Four studies investigated the development of an un-
derstanding of what it is like, mentally, to be in a com-
monly occurring nonconscious state—namely, in a
state of deep, dreamless sleep. In studies 1 and 2, chil-
dren of ages 5, 6, 7, 8, and 10, and adults were asked
questions about whether people in this state could or
would, (1) see, hear, listen, notice, think, wish, pre-
tend, or feel things (primary consciousness), (2) know
that they are asleep or know that they are or are not
perceiving, thinking, feeling, or moving (reflective
consciousness), and (3) deliberately decide or try to
perform mental or physical actions (control-of activity).
These studies showed an increase with age in the ten-
dency to say that these instances of reflective con-
sciousness, control-of activity, and (less consistently)
primary consciousness would not be present in a de-
picted person who was sound asleep and not dream-
ing. Study 3 tested for a more elementary, perhaps
precursory understanding in 6-year-olds, namely,
that a conscious person is at least more likely than an
unconscious, nondreaming one to be engaging in
mental activities. The 6-year-olds did show this un-
derstanding. However, as in studies 1 and 2, they
were also often willing to say that the unconscious
person, although less than likely than the conscious
one to be engaging in these activities, could be doing
so. In Study 4, we assessed the willingness of 5-year-
olds, 8-year-olds, and adults to attribute verbalized,
conscious-sounding thoughts to a “live” (videotaped)
sleeper rather than, as in studies 1–3, a still picture of
one. More than half of the participants in each of the
two child groups made this attribution on at least one
trial, whereas no adult participant ever did. The
adults in this study also showed a much better under-
standing of levels of consciousness than the children
did. That is, when they saw the sleeping individual in
the videotape stir but not wake up in response to a
light touch, they not only concluded that the individ-
ual did “sort of feel” the touch but would not think
about it, they also often justified this conclusion by
saying that the feeling was at a subconscious rather
than a conscious level.
Although the developmental changes observed in
these studies appeared to be more or less gradual and
there was individual variation within each age group,
there were notable differences between the typical
performance of the two youngest child groups (5- and
6-year-olds), the three older child groups ( 7-, 8-, and 10-
year-olds) and the adults. With the sole exception of

the See questions in Study 1 and the Feel question in
Study 4—both very easy questions—the 5- and 6-
year-olds did not respond significantly more accu-
rately than would be expected by chance to any of the
primary-conscious, reflective-consciousness, or control-
of-activity questions in studies 1, 2, and 4 (see Tables
1, 3, and 4). In Study 1 the youngest participants (5-
year-olds) averaged only a nonsignificant 56% correct
to the 10 key questions asked in that study. In Study 3,
only about half of the 6-year-olds responded to the
follow-up questions by denying that the sleeping
child could be experiencing various primary- and re-
flective-consciousness mental states. In Study 4, like-
wise, only a minority of the 5-year-olds consistently
said that the sleeper would not be aware of being
touched and would not remember having been
touched later, after awakening. In each of the first two
studies only 39% of the youngest group said that a
person who is sound asleep and not dreaming would
not know that he or she is asleep. In Study 2 only 22%
of the 6-year-olds said that they would see nothing at
all while in a dreamless sleep; the rest said that they
would see black or dark gray, the alternative possibil-
ity offered to them.
In Study 1 an earlier waking state in which a char-
acter was engaged in a number of mental activities
was contrasted with a subsequent sleeping state, as in
this example: “All morning Lee has been wishing she
had some ginger ale.” Right now she is asleep and not
dreaming. Is she still wishing she had some ginger
ale?” It would not have been surprising if most of the
young children had answered “no” to all such ques-
tions, assuming that a change from a positive to a
negative condition would imply a change from activ-
ity to no activity. That is, they could have answered
correctly without understanding anything at all about
consciousness or unconsciousness just by going with
the apparent demand characteristics of the task. This
clearly did not happen, however. Instead, they consis-
tently denied the sleeping story character only the
mental activity they could plainly see that he or she
was not engaging in—namely, seeing a picture (the
character was depicted with his or her eyes closed). In
Study 4, similarly, seeing a real person in the video-
tape looking dead to the world might have led the 5-
year-olds to assume that such a person must not be
having any thoughts, let alone verbalized, conscious-
sounding ones. But this clearly did not happen either.
It is true that some of the reflective-consciousness
questions in Study 2 could have been difficult for chil-
dren of this age to process simply because of their
complexity (e.g., “Does she know she is not thinking
about anything?”). However, Tables 1, 3, and 4 show
that they did not respond any more correctly to the
Flavell et al. 409
many simpler and more straightforward questions
they were asked (e.g., “Is she still thinking about the
fire station?”). As mentioned in the introduction, re-
cent studies have shown that young children tend to
underestimate the amount of mental activity that does
go on in a conscious mind (Flavell et al., 1993, 1995a,
1997); for example, they are largely unaware of the
stream of consciousness, in themselves as well as in
others. In contrast, the present studies strongly sug-
gest that they also tend to overestimate the amount of
(nondreaming) ideation that can go on in an uncon-
scious mind.
It is of course possible that children of this age re-
ally know more about consciousness and uncon-
sciousness than these studies have revealed, and that
other, more sensitive testing methods would bring
this knowledge to light. The finding in Study 3 that
they are already more disposed to attribute mental
states to a waking person than to a sleeping one when
obliged to choose between the two is consistent with
these possibilities. On the other hand, it was striking
to see how little knowledge of consciousness and un-
consciousness they displayed in all four studies, de-
spite numerous opportunities to do so. Our belief,
then, is that although young children might know
more about these matters than we have shown, they
probably do not know much more.
The 7-, 8-, and 10-year-old children clearly knew
more about unconsciousness than the 5- and 6-year-
olds. Their overall averages of correct responses in
studies 1 and 2 ranged from 69% to 76%, with all of
these averages being significantly higher than chance
expectation. Most comparisons showed that these
older children performed significantly better than
the younger ones and not significantly worse than the
adults. A glance at the asterisked entries in Tables 1–
3 shows that they answered about one-third of the in-
dividual questions significantly more correctly than
would be expected by chance. A number of them also
justified their correct answers in ways that left no
doubt as to their understanding, something that al-
most never happened in the two youngest groups. In
Study 4 also, almost all of the 8-year-olds realized that
the sleeper would not remember the touching inci-
dent after awakening, whereas the 5-year-olds were
at chance on this question. At the same time, they did
fail to perform better than would be expected by
chance on a number of questions in Studies 1, 2, and 4,
and also often failed to justify adequately the correct
answers they did give. Furthermore, in Studies 2 and
4 the adults often made explicit mention of conscious-
ness in their justifications, using words like conscious,
aware, and unconscious, whereas the older children
rarely did (and the younger children never did). Also,
410 Child Development
as previously mentioned, the adults in Study 2
tended to focus on the absence of thinking or con-
sciousness more than on the absence of perception of
external stimuli, whereas the older children talked
about both equally often. This suggests the hypoth-
esis—only a hypothesis, given present evidence—that
children may begin by conceiving of unconsciousness
mainly as a state in which conscious perception of
current external happenings does not occur, and only
later as a state in which nonperceptual or internal-
perceptual activities like thinking, feeling, and reflec-
tive consciousness are also absent. In sum, our data
suggest that there is considerable development in this
area during middle childhood but that development
also continues after this period.
As to the adults, with the exception mainly of some
participants in Study 2, we found that the college stu-
dents in the pilot study and in Studies 1, 2, and 4
largely agreed with our own naive theory that a
nondreaming sleeper would retain the capacity for
nonconscious responding but would mostly or wholly
lack primary consciousness, and would totally lack
reflective consciousness and the ability to control
mental and physical activities deliberately. There
might have been even more agreement among adult
participants if our questions had been about a person
who is in a more extreme and unambiguous state of
consciousness, such as being knocked out or in a coma.
(What young children would have made of such
questions is uncertain, given their presumably lesser
familiarity with nonsleep states of consciousness.) At
the same time, we can imagine areas of disagreements
even among adults concerning such subjective and
hard-to-verify matters. A recent review (Lillard, 1998)
has suggested that adult theories of mind may differ
considerably from culture to culture. It would there-
fore be of interest to know if there is significant inter-
cultural (or even intracultural) variation in adults’
naive theories about consciousness, unconsciousness,
and levels of consciousness and attention.
How might children acquire the adult intuition (in
our culture, at least) that little or no nondreaming
mentation goes on in a sleeping person? They might
learn something about it from parents, the media, or
other outside sources, of course. For example, their
parents may tell them that they did not know about
some event that happened the night before because
they were asleep at the time. Similarly, they can see
that other people are perceptually and intellectually
unresponsive while they are sleeping. However, it
should also be possible for them to infer or consoli-
date this belief on their own, once they are cognitively
mature enough to notice two things: First, their mem-
ory for most recent happenings is quite good; second,
despite this fact, the only mental events they are ever
able to remember from recent periods of sleep are
dreams. From these two observations they might then
infer that the reason they do not also recall having
had perceptions and thoughts during these periods is
that conscious perceptions and thoughts simply do
not occur when one is asleep. The 8-year-olds in
Study 4 may have been almost, but not quite, ready to
draw this conclusion: Like the 5-year-olds, they did
not yet consistently deny thoughts about the touch-
ing incident, but unlike the younger children, they
did consistently deny later recall of the incident.
It may not be surprising, then, that children still
seem to be acquiring intuitions in this area during the
late elementary school years. On the one hand, this is
the period in which they are becoming increasingly
aware of their own memory capacities and limitations
(Schneider & Borkowski, 1998)—when they could
begin to sense what they should and should not be
able to remember. On the other hand, it is also the pe-
riod in which introspective skills are improving and
in which they are learning what waking mental life is
like—for example, that it contains a stream of con-
sciousness, that it involves self-awareness, etc. (Flavell
et al., 1993, 1995a), and that stimuli can be perceived
but not consciously attended to (Flavell et al., 1995b).
As they become more aware of the mental events that
go on in people’s minds when people are conscious,
they become better able to infer that there exist non-
conscious periods in which these mental events do
not go on. It may be logically possible to form some
concept of unconsciousness without much under-
standing of consciousness; for example, a person
could conceivably come to the view that nothing
much happens inside an unconscious mind without
having any clear idea of what happens inside a con-
scious one. Nevertheless, it seems highly probable to
us that a developing concept of consciousness does
help engender a concept of unconsciousness in chil-
dren. The opposite may also be true. That is, a grow-
ing appreciation of all that is absent in unconscious
states may also help children appreciate all that is
present in conscious ones. Thus, the developmental
process here may be the familiar one of reciprocal me-
diation or bi-directional facilitation, with a growing
understanding of consciousness mediating or facili-
tating a growing understanding of unconsciousness
and the reverse.
There may be an additional, related reason why
the children in these studies were so much more will-
ing to attribute conscious mental states to an uncon-
scious person than the adults were. Consider what
goes on psychologically when a conscious mental
state occurs as, for example, when one thinks about

one’s dog or sees it bounding towards one. On the
one hand, there is the content or referent of the mental
states: one thinks about or sees the dog. At the same
time, there is also the thinking or seeing experience it-
self: we think about or see the dog. A conscious mental
event not only has content, it also comprises a men-
tal experience. As philosophers of mind are fond of
describing it, there is “something it is like”, subjec-
tively, for a person to have a conscious thought or per-
cept. In contrast, there is presumably “nothing it is
like,” experientially, for a computer to do a compu-
tation—or, for that matter, for a person to have a
thought or percept that does not become conscious.
We speculate that children are less aware than
adults of the experiential, what-it-is-like-to-have-them
aspects of conscious mental states such as thoughts
and percepts, and instead focus almost exclusively on
their cognitive content. (This is probably less true in
the case of mental states whose subjective, experien-
tial aspects are very salient, such as strong desires
and emotions.) Of course adults also usually “see
through” the experience of having a mental event and
attend only or primarily to the event’s content or ref-
erent; this is the normal, adaptive thing for everyone
to do most of the time. The speculation here is only
that mental states are even more, and more often,
transparent in this respect for children than they are
for adults. If this speculation is correct, it might partly
explain the developmental trends found in the
present studies. When considering whether a person
might be having a conscious mental state (primary or
reflective) right now, children would be less likely
than adults to ask themselves whether that particular
individual could be having it—could, by virtue of be-
ing conscious at that moment and therefore capable
of experiencing it. If it were true that children tend to
be ignorant of, or tend to ignore, the experiential as-
pect of conscious mental states, then they would have
no more reason to deny them to an unconscious per-
son than to a conscious one.1
Becoming more aware of the conscious-uncon-
scious dimension of mental states may make possible
additional insights. Here are a few: People can have,
and be influenced by, thoughts, perceptions, desires,
emotions, and other mental states that they are not
aware of having; that is, mental states can be noncon-
scious or semiconscious as well as conscious, and
may affect our behavior even when they are not con-
scious. People are continually having conscious expe-
1 The authors are grateful to David Rosenthal for suggesting
the line of thinking expressed in this and the preceding para-
graph. He is of course not responsible for any shortcomings
our speculations may have as a developmental-psychological
explanation.
Flavell et al. 411
riences that help define what it is like to be them.
Moreover, what it is like for me to have a given men-
tal content may be different from what it is like for
you to have even that very same content, and of
course we are also likely to differ considerably in
what contents we have. This is part of the reason we
tend to assume that each person is psychologically
unique in some respects, possessing a personality and
sense of self not wholly like that of any other individ-
ual. Insights such as these, born of the various theory-
of-mind acquisitions described in this article, help us
understand what it is to be a human being.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by National Institute of
Mental Health Grant 40687. We are grateful to the
children, teachers and parents of Bing School of Stan-
ford, Foothill Junior College, Los Altos Hills, Sum-
mer Program for Children, and Keys, Duveneck, El
Camelo, and Escondido Elementary Schools of Palo
Alto, California whose cooperation made this inves-
tigation possible.
ADDRESSES AND AFFILIATIONS
Corresponding author: John H. Flavell, Department
of Psychology, Building 420, Stanford University,
Stanford, California 94305-2130; e-mail: flavell@psych.
stanford.edu. Frances Green and Eleanor Flavell are
also at Stanford University.
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