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Constructing the Past and the Future: How Children Understand Time
This article is based on a chapter to appear in Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 2003, vol. 31, Academic Press.
OCTOBER
14, 2002--In a special issue of Scientific American devoted to
time (September 2002), the theoretical physicist Paul Davies wrote
about the inconsistency between physicists' view of time "laid out in
its entirety"--or, as a set of before and after relations, with no special
vantage point--and the conventional, psychological impression of the future
changing into the present changing into a past, in which only the present
is "real." Davies speculates that the explanation for the latter "illusion"
may be found in "psychology, neurophysiology, and maybe linguistics or
culture."
For more than 25 years I have been studying humans’ experience of time, especially the development of time concepts in children, and I have become particularly interested in the psychological basis of a sense of the past and the future. If we can trace the development of children’s understanding of the past and the future, maybe we can better understand the basis of Davies’ illusion.
Developmental psychologists have known for some time that children use tense and related speech forms by the time they are three years old. However, it is not clear how they understand the times of the past and future events to which they refer. In most cases children can appear to have an accurate understanding simply by echoing the tense forms that adults used a moment before. In order to learn how children of different ages understand the past and the future, we need to develop special methods for revealing their abilities.
The Development
of a Sense of the Past
Adults'
sense of the past is the product of a mixture of processes, some tied
to learning in school (for example, the dates of historical events) and
others to our own memories of past events. Even for events that we remember,
there are multiple ways in which we distinguish past times. Sometimes
we rely on direct impressions of the ages of events (compare the vividness
of your memory for breakfast this morning with that of a breakfast several
months ago). But usually we reconstruct when an event must have been,
given what we remember about it. (If something happened when I was an
undergraduate at Oberlin, it had to be between 1968 and 1972.) <...more>
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