Beth Brdlik, a rising junior from Moorestown, New Jersey, is working in Bill Friedman's lab this summer. Behind her and Friedman is the back of the booth where babies watch videotapes of simple temporal events.
			Bill Friedman Takes Another Stab at Understanding Our Understanding of Time By Betty Gabrielli
	Friedman's subjects see this tape--of red liquid being poured out of a beaker--run forward and backward. They pay more attention to the tape that runs forward. PHOTOGRAPHS BY LINDA GRASHOFF		JUNE 23, 1999--Do 8-month-old babies prefer to watch liquid flow realistically--governed by gravity--or would they rather watch it flow unrealistically--up? What accounts for the babies' preference? A new three-year grant of $121,673 from the National Science Foundation will enable William Friedman, professor of psychology, formulate possible answers to these questions and explore issues related to them. Friedman has been researching the development of children's understanding of time since 1976. Besides publishing his work in peer-reviewed journals, he has edited two books on the topic, Time, Action, and Cognition: Towards Bridging the Gap (with Françoise Macar and Viviane Pouthas, 1992) and The Developmental Psychology of Time (1990) and written a book on the subject, About Time: Inventing the Fourth Dimension (1990). Friedman's findings from the new project will complement recent discoveries about infants' knowledge of other fundamental domains, including space, gravity, object permanence (the concept that--as it develops in babies--accounts for their enjoyment in playing peek-a-boo), and causality. Since 1990 Friedman has conducted about a dozen studies on how human infants and young children adapt to the temporal structure and causal configuration of their environment. His grants, from the National Institutes of Health in 1993 and the National Science Foundation in 1996 and 1999, total $288,735. The idea for research on infants' sensitivity to temporally unidirectional events--things that can happen only one way in time, such as toy blocks being tossed down onto a table top--arose in a course Friedman co-taught in the late 1980s with Bruce Richards, professor of physics, titled The Physics and Psychology of Time. "This current work can help us better understand the growth of temporal knowledge and thereby provide a detailed basis of comparison when studying pathological development," says Friedman. "The work also contributes to our knowledge of the development of children's understanding of causality by focusing on human sensitivity to temporal order in simple event sequences. "Adults are highly attuned to forward versus backward presentations of temporally unidirectional phenomena. However, we are only beginning to understand the development of this ability and the processes underlying it." Research over the past seven years, Friedman says, has suggested that babies develop expectations about the temporal direction of several transformations, such as pouring a liquid or breaking an object, when they are between 4 months and 17 months old. And which do they prefer to watch--the realistic or the unrealistic pouring? The realistic version, says Friedman, basing his answer on his measurements of how long a baby will watch a videotape of the two versions, one played forward and one played backward. Why? Friedman thinks it is because at age 8 months children are building their mental processes of physical events. They are not as interested in watching the liquid appear to flow upward because it makes no sense at a time when they are working to make sense out of their physical environment. Friedman notes that adults at psychology conventions prefer to watch the impossible version. The point in their development at which people shift their preference is also of interest to him. Friedman's grant was awarded by the Human Cognition and Perception program of the National Science Foundation's Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Science and was effective June 1. Friedman conducts his research in Oberlin's Department of Psychology laboratories. He recruits his subjects through the Allen Memorial Hospital, the Oberlin Clinic, the Elyria Health Department, and the Ohio Bureau of Vital Statistics. Several Oberlin students help carry out the projects.
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