Development of young children's understanding that the recent past is causally bound to the present.

The results of 6 studies (involving 304 children) suggested that 4- and 5-year olds, but not 3-year olds, understand that very recent past events determine the present. In Studies 1–3, 3- and 4-year old children were introduced to 2 empty hiding locations. With children's backs to these locations, a camera recorded an experimenter secretly hiding a puppet in one of them. Children viewed the videotape of what had just happened, along with another tape that depicted identical events with a different child and with the puppet hidden in the other location. Only 4-year olds were subsequently able to locate the puppet, even though 3-year olds remembered the contents of the tapes and understood the equivalence between the video events and the real world. In Study 4, similar effects were obtained when a verbal analog of the test was presented to 3–5 year olds. Studies 5 and 6 showed that when children observed 2 events in which they had just participated, only 5-year olds understood that the most recent events were relevant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)