ABSTRACT
The contributors to this book have reported exciting, ingenious, and useful research programs on children’s source monitoring in many dif ferent contexts. This chapter draws together some of the common themes in the book, and makes suggestions for further research in this area of children’s cognition. Rather than repeat in detail the points made earlier in the volume, this chapter makes holistic comments on the field in response to the work reported in the preceding chapters, and readers are urged to the refer to the actual chapters for details of the studies and discussions. In the first half of the chapter, I highlight the development in our understanding of children’s source monitoring over recent years. Particularly, I focus on the wealth of source discrimi nations that are currently under investigation, the usefulness of the conclusions drawn, the adaptive value of source-monitoring errors, and the need to study source monitoring in context. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to those questions that are not fully answered by current research, including techniques to train children to monitor source, distinguishing between multiple (i.e., more than two) sources, and the relationship between source monitoring and the social and emotional aspects of children’s development.
