title: Searching and planning: young children's reasoning about past and future event sequences.
abstract: Six experiments examined children's ability to make inferences using temporal order information. Children completed versions of a task involving a toy zoo; one version required reasoning about past events (search task) and the other required reasoning about future events (planning task). Children younger than 5 years failed both the search and the planning tasks, whereas 5-year-olds passed both (Experiments 1 and 2). However, when the number of events in the sequence was reduced (Experiment 3), 4-year-olds were successful on the search task but not the planning task. Planning difficulties persisted even when relevant cues were provided (Experiments 4 and 5). Experiment 6 showed that improved performance on the search task found in Experiment 3 was not due to the removal of response ambiguity.
authors.affiliation: Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom. k.l.t.mccolgan@warwick.ac.uk
authors.forename: Kerry L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: McColgan
authors.forename: Teresa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: McCormack
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011340:Problem Solving; D013998:Time Perception