In the present study, children in the age group of 3-5 years had to perform a source-monitoring task, a cognitive shifting task and an inhibitory control task, and the correlations between the tasks were examined. In the source-monitoring task, children were asked to discriminate objects they acted on (internal source) from objects an experimenter acted on (external source). They were also administered the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task as a cognitive shifting and Black/White task as an inhibitory control task. We found that there was a significant correlation between the measure on the external source and the performances in the DCCS task. The results indicated that cognitive shifting may play an important role in source monitoring where children have to discriminate internal sources from external sources.

Key words: source monitoring, executive function, inhibitory control, preschool children