Age-related changes in duration production for familiar actions

The present study dealt with an aspect of temporal cognition that is rarely discussed in the literature: the ability to estimate the duration of familiar actions. In everyday life, we often have to process both very short durations (e.g., when we are driving), but we also have to deal with actions or events that last for several minutes or even hours (e.g., watching a film). The aim of our study was to examine whether young children aged six and 9 years and adults are able to estimate the time usually taken by various familiar actions to perform using a production task. More precisely, they were successively presented with photographs of familiar actions that usually take more (e.g., blown a balloon up) or less (e.g., blow a candle out) time to perform. As soon as a photograph was presented on the screen, they have to start estimating the time taken to perform the depicted action and press the space bar when they think that this time has elapsed. Results showed that the 6-year-olds failed to produce longer durations for the long action category than for the short one, unlike the older children and adults. Moreover, for the short action category, increasingly short durations were produced with age. Only the adults produced different durations for different actions belonging to the same category (i.e., short or long). These results are discussed in relation to the development of an event-based system of time that can be used to solve duration tasks. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Young children understand the relative durations of daily actions. There is not any mapping between duration words and approximate durations in young children. Young children have great difficulty in understanding that the same duration can be shared by different actions. What the present study adds? There is a clear improvement with age in the ability to produce the durations of familiar actions. Children can use the event-based system of time they develop to successfully perform duration tasks.