Young children's understanding of briefly versus extremely delayed images of the self: emergence of the autobiographical stance

Abstract

Eighty-eight young 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were scheduled for 2 testing sessions. On Visit 1, the children were videotaped playing a game while an experimenter covertly placed a large sticker on their head and covertly removed it after the game. One week later, the children were videotaped playing a different game. A sticker was again covertly placed on their heads. Half the children in each age group then observed the video from the previous week, whereas the other half observed the tape from 3 min earlier. Less than half of the 3-year-olds in both conditions reached up for the sticker. In contrast, the majority of 4- and 5-year-olds in the briefly delayed condition reached for the sticker, but few in the extremely delayed condition did so. By 4 years of age, children may have developed a causal understanding of the self's endurance through time.