Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 20, Issue 3, July–September 2005, Pages 362-372
Cognitive Development

Recalling yesterday and predicting tomorrow

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2005.05.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Three-, 4- and 5-year-old children were asked to report something that they did do yesterday and something that they were going to do tomorrow. They were also asked to recall events that had not occurred yesterday, and predict events that would not occur tomorrow. In two studies these simple questions revealed striking age differences in the ability to report personal events from the past and the future. Only a minority of 3-year-olds but a majority of the older children were able to appropriately answer these questions. These findings substantiate the proposal that the ability to recall past events and the ability to predict future events (i.e., mental time travel), emerge in tandem between the ages of 3 and 5 years.

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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