Preschoolers begin to differentiate the times of events from throughout the lifespan

Three-, 4- and 5-year-old children were presented with simple timelines of past and future and asked to place pictures representing different events at appropriate places. Events came from three rough temporal groupings for both past and future (24 hours, 12 months and several years). Placement of items in the categories improved with age. Three-year-olds placed events that occurred years ago further away on the past timeline than events that had occurred more recently, but they failed to discriminate between the times of future events. Four-year-olds performed no better than 3-year-olds on the past timeline, but successfully differentiated daily events from more remote future events. Five-year-olds differentiated between all three temporal categories of events in both the past and future. The ability to localize events at distinct points in time appears to undergo major transition during the preschool years.