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Updated: Feb 10, 2026
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Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
35.5K
The mental timeline is gradually constructed in childhood
Katharine A Tillman1,2, Nestor Tulagan1,3, Eren Fukuda1
1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, California, USA.
Developmental Science
|May 12, 2018
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Developmental Psychology
- Spatial Cognition
Background:
- Adults commonly use a left-to-right mental timeline for temporal reasoning.
- The development and malleability of this mental timeline in children are not well understood.
- Cultural variations exist, but the linear representation of time is often considered primitive.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if preschoolers and kindergarteners spontaneously use spatial timelines for temporal reasoning.
- To assess the degree to which children's time-space mappings are adult-like.
- To explore the flexibility and conventionalization of mental timelines in early childhood.
Main Methods:
- A sticker placement task was employed with 4-year-old preschoolers and kindergarteners.
- Participants were asked to arrange temporal events (meals) and time words (yesterday, today, tomorrow).
- Spatial priming conditions were manipulated to test spontaneous timeline use.
Main Results:
- Four-year-olds could arrange temporal items linearly with minimal spatial cues.
- Preschoolers, unlike older children and adults, did not spontaneously use a linear timeline without priming.
- Children of all ages showed flexibility, easily adopting unconventional vertical timelines when primed.
Conclusions:
- Children's initial mappings between time and space are flexible, not automatic.
- The spontaneous use of linear mental timelines becomes more conventionalized during the early school years.
- Early childhood is a critical period for the development and malleability of time-space representations.
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