|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
||
Constructing the Past and the Future: How Children Understand Time
There is probably
no single explanation for young children’s past-future confusion.
One factor that may contribute to assigning recent events to the near
future is remembering adults’ statements that an event is coming
soon even after the event has occurred. Impending events may be mis-assigned
to the recent past because thoughts about both recent and approaching
events are relatively active in memory. Finally, one of my recent studies
suggests that the past-future status of events is judged more accurately
by children who have a general understanding that the past
and future are distinct
categories, an understanding that is common by about six years of age.
Six-year-olds are far more likely than four-year-olds to grasp some of
the main distinctions that adults make about the past and future, such
as the belief that one can know the past with certainty but that the future
has an element of uncertainty.
During the elementary-school
years, children develop representations of a number of time patterns
and use them to think about the times of past and future events.
The
Past and Future in Psychology and Physics
The studies of children indicate that our view of the past and the
future depends both on basic cognitive processes and the social construction
of time. Basic memory mechanisms provide rough information about the distances
of events in the past. In the case of the future, basic properties of
memory (such as the influences of recency and frequency) determine which
of adults’ references to future events will be accessible and which
will be difficult to retrieve. These mechanisms help young children differentiate
times within the past and within the future, but they can sometimes provide
misleading information about whether an event belongs to one or the other.
Cultural contributions to children’s sense of place in time are the
linguistic devices and conventional representations of time patterns that,
once mastered, provide them with frameworks for structuring their experience.
Children also learn their culture’s beliefs about the past and the
future, for example whether the past and future can be known with certainty
or influenced through one’s actions.
This brings us back to Davies’ question about the psychological basis of the past-present-future distinction. I think the answer is that humans come to understand time through the development of mental representations of many different time patterns. On rare occasions, when we wax philosophical about time, we may envision a tripartite division of the past, present, and future. More usually, though, we imagine the order of times on whatever scale is of interest for planning or for recollection, whether it is the day, week, year, or some other pattern. By attending to our present "location" within that time pattern, we achieve a sense of place in time. Physicists’ view of time laid out in its entirety may be just another representation of time in our repertoire, one that is useful for describing the physical world but incomplete in capturing human experience.
Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to online.news@oberlin.edu.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
