How does the mental timeline influence temporal memory?

• In Event: Attention and memory in infants and children

Abstract

Spatial representations of time are all around us. For example, we may look forward to an upcoming vacation or use a calendar to plan out our week. In addition, in many cultures, adults represent time using a mental timeline, a mental model of time based off of a linear reference frame (e.g., Bender & Beller, 2014; Bonato et al., 2012). Around age 6, children in the US begin to show a left-to-right orientation of their mental timeline, consistent with the orientation of the mental timeline in US adults (Tillman et al., 2018). This emergence of the mental timeline may have implications for the development of temporal memory. Children as young as 7 have been shown to draw on the mental timeline to remember the temporal order of events, as demonstrated by better memory for temporal order when items are presented from left-to-right compared to right-to-left (Pathman et al., 2018). Here, we will test for an association between individual differences in the strength of children’s mental timelines and their memory for temporal order in a task that does not involve explicit spatial cues. This association would suggest that one reason why the mental timeline is so common across cultures is because it facilitates temporal memory.

Six-year-old children (N=50) will perform a timeline task adapted from Tillman et al., (2018) and an episodic memory task. In the timeline task, children will place icons on the screen to represent the order of events. The experimenter will place one icon in the middle of the screen and children will place two additional icons to represent events that happen earlier and later (e.g., breakfast, lunch, and dinner). In the episodic memory task, children will watch an animated video that depicts a character playing with different objects in unique locations (Figure 1). After viewing the animation, children will be tested on their memory for temporal order (what happened first?) and item-location binding (where was this item encountered?). Our prediction is that children who produce linear arrangements in the timeline task, and particularly left-to-right arrangements, will exhibit better temporal memory in the episodic memory task, whereas performance on the timeline last will not influence item-location binding. The first analysis we will run will use a linear mixed effects model to predict memory accuracy with number of lines in the timeline task and memory question type (temporal or item-location) as fixed effects and subject as a random effect. The second model will substitute number of left-to-right lines instead of total number of lines.

All data collection will occur remotely over a live video chat. Our lab has been piloting online testing methods over the summer and we have been increasing our recruitment nationally. Based on our current recruitment and testing rates, it should be feasible to collect and analyze data from 50 participants prior to the SRCD meeting in April 2021.

Authors

• S. Bahar Sener, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Ariel Starr, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author