Logical searches of young children in hiding and finding tasks

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Abstract
Thirty‐two 3 and 32 4‐year‐olds were tested on two tasks which required them to infer the location of a concealed object. In the hiding tusk the child watched while an object was hidden and then attempted to find it; in the finding tusk the child watched while one object was found and then attempted to find a duplicate of it in the same place. Each sequence of events that the child watched ruled out two of the four locations in a linear array as possible hiding places for the object, but did not specify which of the remaining two contained it.The children did use the information conveyed by the sequences of events to decide where to search. Older children generally did better than younger children both in their first choices and in their second choices when the first, although correct, did not locate the object. However, neither age group made the correct choice of a second location consistently. This suggested that the children encountered mnemonic or logical difficulties, or both, because of the fact that two locations were equally compatible with a given sequence of events.

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