A Cognitive Study On The Future Time Sequence Of The Daily Routine Activities In 4- To 7-year-olds

Children's knowledge of temporal pattern is mainly developed from daily routine activities, and its development is limited by experience. Therefore, when they are in the cognitive operation on future time, children are not capable to select the, corresponding temporal representation according to the different mental structure of future time as adults do. Important as the study of future time cognition is, there are few studies on children's knowledge of future time and maybe none that combinates multiple study paradigms by now. To explore children's cognitive ability on future time sequence in the daily routine activities will help to know more about the development of their temporal representation. This study tried to do this exploration by using both paradigms of the lag judgment and the order judgment on children ranging from 4 to 7 years.The study included two experiments. In Experiment 1, we designed the cognitive task of differentiating five "tomorrow's" events with different time of occurring. In Experiment 2, the cognitive task was to distinguish four events occurring in the "next year". Both experiments employed the picture-pointing procedure and the picture-ordering procedure. The former procedure had two indexes. One is the correlation of two production values and the other is the accuracy of judgments. The latter procedure's index is the correct scores. The results were as follows:(1)in this experimental environment, all children were able to differentiate the future distance between every "tomorrow's" event and the referent time point,but the accuracy of lag judgments increased with age. (2)In this experimental environment, all the groups could order correctly the"tomorrow's" events with a high accuracy and there is no significant differencebetween different groups. (3) In this experimental environment, children aged 4 to 6 years failed todifferentiate the future distances between every "next-year's" event and thereferent time, while 7 year olds could do it roughly with a slightoverestimation. (4)In this experimental environment, all children's performances of ordering theevents in the "next-year" were low, but the age effect was significant: 4 yearolds failed perfectly, few 5 year olds made it on account of the teacher'sprevious information, and children aged 6 and 7 years performed significantlybetter than those aged 4 and 5 years. (5)In this experimental environment, after children had acquired some temporalrepresentation, their judgments in one particular time unit of future eventsnearer the referent time were more accurate than the judgments of those fartherfrom the reference.