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In a series of 4 experiments, we tested children's understanding that the causes of their actions must necessarily be attributed to information known prior to (i.e., "pre-action" information), rather than after (i.e., "post-action" information), the completion of their actions. For example, children were shown a dog, asked to get some cheese to feed the dog, and then returned to discover a mouse. In Experiment 1, the majority of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds claimed that they had gotten the cheese to feed the mouse. In Experiments 2 and 3, we ruled out the possibilities that (1) children had forgotten the critical "pre-action" information (e.g., "dog"), and (2) children had merely attributed the cause of their action to the most recent item (e.g., "dog") that they had seen. Finally, in Experiment 4, we determined that 7-year-olds, but not 6-year-olds, correctly attributed the cause of their action to the pre-action information, suggesting that this is the age at which children are no longer influenced by associative post-action information when explaining the causes of their actions. These results are discussed in terms of their relevance for causal reasoning, action explanation, and memory.

We explored preschoolers' ability to explain actions that were motivated by two different phenomena: false beliefs and past realities. While both contexts were identical with respect to their explanatory requirements, only the falsebelief context required children to understand that a mis-representation was the basis of the action. Results revealed that children were significantly more competent at explaining actions in the past-reality context than the false-belief context. Even so, 3-year-olds experienced some difficulty with the past-reality context signalling a more fundamental limitation generating explanations in light of an unexpected change. These findings have implications for the debate surrounding children's false-belief-based predictions versus explanations, and explanatory capacity more broadly during the preschool years.