Remembering the right locations: Factors affecting young children's logical search ability

Four-year-olds searched for a lost object on two occasions. On the first occasion, half the children participated in a tabletop condition and searched for an item after watching a sequence of events in which a doll lost the item; the rest searched under naturalistic conditions, looking for an object that had been lost while they tidied away some toys. Half the children were then questioned about their search behaviors, after which they all participated in the second task-a tabletop search task. For the first task, more searches were in the “critical area” (those locations bounded by the last place the item was seen and the first place it was found missing) if children searched in the naturalistic, rather than the tabletop, condition. In the second task, children searched in the “critical area” more often if they were queried about their first search, or had searched in the naturalistic task. The results are discussed in terms of factors affecting the development of problem solving competence.