ABSTRACT
Children learn about the world from many different sources including peers, books, personal experiences, parents, teachers, or other adults. On many occasions, the information provided by these sources is useful or entertaining for children. On other occasions, however, the information may be fictitious (see chaps. 7, 8, and 10, this volume), incomplete (chap. 4, this volume), or ambiguous (chap. 3, this volume). It is clearly important to know how exposure to multiple sources of information can affect children’s knowledge of, and consequenüy their behavior in, the world in which they live. If children can integrate information gleaned from multiple, credible sources, then they can effectively build up a coherent knowledge base. When children are exposed to inaccurate, inconsistent, or incoherent information, however, their resulting knowledge base may be quite different. One way that children would be protected from such “contamination” is if they can judge the credibility of the source that provided the information and discount information from those that are noncredible, and interested readers are referred to the research discussed by Robinson (chap. 3, this volume) and Welch-Ross (chap. 9, this volume) on this issue.
