Recalling yesterday and predicting tomorrow
Section snippets
Participants
Forty children aged 3 years old (36–47 months) and 4 years old (48–59) (n = 20 per age group) were recruited from the Early Cognitive Development Unit database in Brisbane, Australia. Three-year-olds were on average 40.3 months of age (S.D. = 3.8 months; 10 boys, 10 girls) and 4-year-olds 52.8 months (S.D. = 3.9 months; 8 boys, 12 girls).
Procedure
Children were interviewed in a testing room at the University of Queensland with the child's parent/s present. Children were asked the following four recall
Experiment 2
In Experiment 2 we attempted to replicate the findings of Experiment 1, and introduced three minor amendments. In Experiment 1 children's responses were scored by parents as correct or incorrect using non-verbal signals to the researcher. To minimise the possibility of children noting that signal a less intrusive scoring method was implemented in Experiment 2. Another issue in the first study was the prompting schedule used with the children, which was open to variation by children's unexpected
General discussion
This study explored how preschool children answer simple questions about what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. Consistent with predictions, a majority of 4-year-olds, but only a minority of 3-year-olds, were able to correctly report events they had experienced yesterday and would experience tomorrow. Three-year-olds were able to report events in response to the questions, but the events they reported were often incorrect. There was no evidence for an improvement in reporting of
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the parents and children who participated in these studies, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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