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

Grant, Janie Busby; Suddendorf, Thomas

doi:10.1080/17405620802102947

Cited by 61 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Developmental milestones appear to be achieved over the preschool years (Suddendorf and Moore, 2011; Suddendorf and Redshaw, in press). During this period, children begin to show competence on tasks requiring them to delay gratification for the future (Mischel et al, 1989; Moore et al, 1998; Garon et al, 2012), save resources for the future (Atance and Meltzoff, 2005; Metcalf and Atance, 2011), place multiple future episodes in time relative to each other (Friedman, 2000; Busby Grant and Suddendorf, 2009; Hayne et al, 2011; Hudson and Mayhew, 2011), learn a rule to be applied in the future (Kliegel and Jäger, 2007), plan an intervention that will help a character in the future (McColgan and Mccormack, 2008; McCormack and Hanley, 2011), and evaluate the likelihood of future events (Lagattuta and Sayfan, 2011). The current study documents the development of another key future-oriented capacity: adaptively linking past and deferred future episodes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes

Redshaw¹,

Suddendorf²

2013

Front. Psychol.

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Previous experiments have demonstrated that by 4 years of age children can use information from a past episode to solve a problem for the very next future episode. However, it remained unclear whether 4-year-olds can similarly use such information to solve a problem for a more removed future episode that is not of immediate concern. In the current study we introduced 4-year-olds to problems in one room before taking them to another room and distracting them for 15 min. The children were then offered a choice of items to place into a bucket that was to be taken back to the first room when a 5-min sand-timer had completed a cycle. Across two conceptually distinct domains, the children placed the item that could solve the deferred future problem above chance level. This result demonstrates that by 48 months many children can recall a problem from the past and act in the present to solve that problem for a deferred future episode. We discuss implications for theories about the nature of episodic foresight.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes

Redshaw¹,

Suddendorf²

2013

Front. Psychol.

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“…For example, Friedman (1991) showed that four-year-olds can judge the relative order of two unrelated events that occurred in their schools six weeks apart (a lesson on tooth brushing and a demo of how video cameras work). A number of other studies have also shown that fourand five-year-olds make some judgments about the order of unrelated events over extended time periods (Friedman, 2000;Friedman & Kemp, 1998;Friedman et al, 1995;Hudson & Mayhew, 2011;McCormack & Hanley, 2011), although children find it easier to order past than future events (Busby-Grant & Suddendorf, 2009;McCormack & Hanley, 2011). Some of these studies used a time line procedure whereby children had to place events at locations on a line stretching back into the past or forward into the future, and although children of this age are not perfect at this task, their above-chance performance suggests that they understood this format (Friedman & Kemp, 1998;Hudson & Mayhew, 2011;though see DroitVolet & Coull, 2015).…”

Section: Stage (C): Linear Event-independent Time (4-5 Years)mentioning

confidence: 98%

The Development of Temporal Concepts: Learning to Locate Events in Time

McCormack¹,

Hoerl

2017

Timing &Amp; Time Perception

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A new model of the development of temporal concepts is described that assumes that there are substantial changes in how children think about time in the early years. It is argued that there is a shift from understanding time in an event-dependent way to an event-independent understanding of time. Early in development, very young children are unable to think about locations in time independently of the events that occur at those locations. It is only with development that children begin to have a proper grasp of the distinction between past, present, and future, and represent time as linear and unidirectional. The model assumes that although children aged two to three years may categorize events differently depending on whether they lie in the past or the future, they may not be able to understand that whether an event is in the future or in the past is something that changes as time passes and varies with temporal perspective. Around four to five years, children understand how causality operates in time, and can grasp the systematic relations that obtain between different locations in time, which provides the basis for acquiring the conventional clock and calendar system.

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“…To our knowledge, although several studies have asked how children map time onto external spatial artifacts (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, & Zorzi, 2012;Busby Grant & Suddendorf, 2009;Friedman, 2000Friedman, , 2002Friedman & Kemp, 1998;Hudson & Mayhew, 2011;Tillman, Marghetis, Barner, & Srinivasan, 2017), and others have examined the direction of children's counting (e.g., Göbel, McCrink, Fischer, & Shaki, 2018;Shaki, Fischer, & Göbel, 2012), only two previous studies have tested whether children produce LR representations of time in the absence of training or experimentally imposed artifacts that force the use of a line. One study (Dobel, Diesendruck, & Bölte, 2007) showed that while adults and literate children tended to represent the agent, object, and recipient in a verbally described event congruently with their reading/ writing direction, preschoolers did not show this bias.…”

Section: Research Highlightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The mental timeline is gradually constructed in childhood

Tillman

Tulagan

Fukuda

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

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When reasoning about time, English-speaking adults often invoke a "mental timeline" stretching from left to right. Although the direction of the timeline varies across cultures, the tendency to represent time as a line has been argued to be ubiquitous and primitive. On this hypothesis, we might predict that children also spontaneously invoke a spatial timeline when reasoning about time. However, little is known about how and when the mental timeline develops, or to what extent it is variable and malleable in childhood. Here, we used a sticker placement task to test whether preschoolers and kindergarteners spontaneously map temporal events (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and deictic time words (yesterday, today, tomorrow) onto lines, and to what degree their representations of time are adult-like. We found that, at age 4, preschoolers were able to arrange temporal items in lines with minimal spatial priming. However, unlike kindergarteners and adults, most preschoolers did not represent time as a line spontaneously, in the absence of priming, and did not prefer left-to-right over right-to-left lines. Furthermore, unlike most adults, children of all ages could be easily primed to adopt an unconventional vertical timeline. Our findings suggest that mappings between time and space in children are initially flexible, and become increasingly automatic and conventionalized in the early school years.

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

Cited by 61 publications

References 60 publications

Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes

Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes

The Development of Temporal Concepts: Learning to Locate Events in Time

The mental timeline is gradually constructed in childhood

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