Pre-school children find it difficult to correctly report if it is morning or afternoon. The present study tested whether children could learn a non-verbal Time-Place Learning (TPL) task that depended on time of day. Twenty-five 4-year-olds were repeatedly asked to find a toy in one of two boxes. Children in the Cued condition were told the toy was in one box in the morning and in another box in the afternoon. Children in the Not Cued condition were told the toy was sometimes in one box and sometimes in the other box. After 80 trials, children were asked if it was morning or afternoon. About 65% of the children learned the TPL task, and about three-quarters of the children verbally identified if it was morning or afternoon. However, the children who learned the TPL task were not necessarily the children who correctly answered whether it was morning or afternoon, and those in the Cued condition were no more likely to solve the task than those in the Not Cued condition. The implication is that children have a sense of time that can be used to solve spatio-temporal contingencies, but does not depend on the verbal understanding of time of day.

学龄前儿童发现很难准确报告上午或下午。本研究测试了儿童是否可以学习依赖于一天中不同时间的非语言时间－地点学习（TPL）任务。反复要求25岁的4岁孩子在两个盒子之一中找到一个玩具。处于提示状态的儿童被告知玩具在早上放在一个盒子里，下午在另一个盒子里。告知处于“未提示”状态的孩子，玩具有时放在一个盒子里，有时放在另一个盒子里。经过80次审判，孩子们被问到是上午还是下午。大约65％的孩子学习了TPL任务，大约四分之三的孩子在口头上确定是上午还是下午。然而，学习了TPL任务的孩子不一定是正确回答上午或下午的孩子，处于“提示”状态的孩子比没有“提示”状态的孩子更不可能解决任务。这意味着孩子具有时间感，可以用来解决时空上的突发事件，但不依赖于对时间的口头理解。