The mental timeline is gradually constructed in childhood

Abstract

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.

Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space–Time Mappings

“…However, surprisingly little is yet known about the developmental emergence of spatial metaphors for time in any population, although behavioral studies have begun to examine English and Italian-speaking children's lateralized representations associated with deictic time words (Nava, Rinaldi, Bulf, & Cassia, 2017;Tillman, Tulagan, Fukuda, & Barner, 2018). However, surprisingly little is yet known about the developmental emergence of spatial metaphors for time in any population, although behavioral studies have begun to examine English and Italian-speaking children's lateralized representations associated with deictic time words (Nava, Rinaldi, Bulf, & Cassia, 2017;Tillman, Tulagan, Fukuda, & Barner, 2018).…”

“…Indeed, by 5 to 6 years of age, native English-speaking children from North America prefer to arrange stickers representing events in a temporal sequence in a left-to-right order on a blank sheet of card, indicating acquisition of space-time mapping on a lateral plane (Tillman et al, 2018). Indeed, by 5 to 6 years of age, native English-speaking children from North America prefer to arrange stickers representing events in a temporal sequence in a left-to-right order on a blank sheet of card, indicating acquisition of space-time mapping on a lateral plane (Tillman et al, 2018).…”

Children gradually construct spatial representations of temporal events

“…Although the question of how and when temporal sequences become spatially modeled in the mind is a fundamentally developmental one, research on the emergence of the MTL in children is limited. One recent study indicates that even 3-year-old English-speakers represent temporal sequences from LR (Autry et al, 2019), suggesting that substantial experience with reading and writing is not required, while others indicate that, unlike older children, preschoolers do not spontaneously produce LR representations of temporal events (Dobel et al, 2017;Tillman et al, 2018). Here, we further explore the development of space-time mappings in the mind by testing whether preschoolers prefer visual narratives in which the spatial ordering of images matches their temporal ordering, and whether they differ from adults with respect to preferences for particular directions.…”

“…English-speakers kindergarteners organize time-denoting stickers from LR (Tillman et al, 2018;Tversky, Kugelmass, & Winter, 1991), while Arabic-speaking children, who read and write from RL also represent time in that direction (Tversky, Kugelmass, & Winter, 1991).…”

“…For example, when 4-year-olds are provided with a printed horizontal timeline to use, they represent the sequence of temporal events in a LR line more frequently and accurately than chance would predict (Tillman et al, 2017). Similarly, if they are primed with a horizontal line beforehand, 4-year-olds are more likely to create LR representations of time than RL or TB representations (Tillman et al, 2018). Furthermore, even without a horizontal template or prime, 3-to 4-year-olds place colored cards in LR lines to represent the order in which those colors are presented on a computer screen (Autry et al, 2019).…”