Poster #36 - Reasoning About Changes Over Time in Young Children

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Time is an essential dimension of the universe. It cannot be perceived, but it can be noticed through changes. The ability to reason about changes reflects a basic understanding of time. This study investigated how temporal reasoning ability develops during the preschool years. Specifically, how children reason about effects of the past and future on the present was examined through child-familiar contexts of gain or loss. A past event, but not a future event, could cause the present state of affairs and the grasp of this causal asymmetry is the crux of understanding and reasoning about time. In this study, children extracted temporal information from language and used that information to reason about changes. To highlight this process, we contrasted children’s performance on a temporal reasoning task to their performance on two control tasks that only required matching items or identifying outcomes.

One hundred and fifty-six 3- to 5-year-olds completed Temporal Reasoning Task, Item Matching Task, and Outcome Identification Task. In the Temporal Reasoning Task, children viewed two photos, each with a boy or a girl on it. They were told that one of them obtained or lost X yesterday and the other would obtain or lose X tomorrow. Children were asked to select the one that has X right now (See Figure 1). As controls, Item Matching Task and Outcome Identification Task were conducted in the same way except that temporal reasoning was not required. In the Item Matching Task, children were told that one character obtained X and the other obtained Y (or one will lose X and the other will lose Y). They only needed to distinguish the two items and match them with their characters. In the Outcome Identification Task, children were told that one character obtained X and the other did not obtain X (or one lost X and the other did not lose X). They needed to understand the outcome of the gain or loss actions, the contrast between affirmation and negation, and then identify the one with the required outcome (See Table 1). For each task, memory questions were asked to check whether children remember the provided information. Performance on the test questions was compared across the three tasks.

Preliminary ANCOVA of 2 (Scenario: Gain or Loss) × 3 (Age: 3-, 4-, or 5-year-olds) × 3 (Task: Temporal Reasoning, Item Matching, or Outcome Identifying) on accuracy with memory performance as a covariate showed main effects of Age, F(2,146) = 5.06, p < .01, Task, F(2,146) = 19.25, p < .001, and an interaction of Scenario, Age, and Task, F(4,146) = 3.81, p < .01. In general, 4- and 5-year-olds performed better than 3-year-olds; all age groups were better at the Item Matching and Outcome Identification Tasks than they were at the Temporal Reasoning Task (See Figure 2). These results indicate that temporal reasoning is more difficult, perhaps involving more complex processes, than matching and understanding causality. More research is needed to determine the specific components that make temporal reasoning challenging for children.

Authors

• Meng Zhang, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author

• Judith A Hudson, Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author