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[Sex and age differences in the subjective assessment of time by preschoolers]
Insights
Preschoolers accurately estimate short and long sound durations. Boys, unlike girls, reduce time assessment variability as they age, unrelated to attention.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Auditory Perception
Background:
- Understanding time perception in early childhood is crucial for cognitive development.
- Previous research indicates age-related changes in temporal processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate time perception accuracy in preschool children (2.5–6 years).
- To examine sex differences in time estimation and its developmental trajectory.
- To explore the relationship between time perception variability and attention levels.
Main Methods:
- Cross-modal matching task used to assess duration perception.
- Children evaluated auditory signals with durations of 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10 seconds.
Main Results:
- Preschoolers demonstrated higher accuracy for extreme durations (1 and 10 seconds) within the tested range.
- Boys exhibited a consistent trend towards reduced assessment variability with increasing age, unlike girls.
- This age-related reduction in variability among boys was not correlated with their attention levels.
Conclusions:
- Early childhood time perception is characterized by better discrimination of boundary durations.
- Sex-based developmental trajectories exist in the refinement of temporal judgments.
- Attention does not appear to mediate the age-related decrease in temporal variability observed in boys.
Abstract:
Time perception was studied in children under school age from 2.5 to 6 years. Using cross-modal matching, the children assessed durations of 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 10-sec sound signals. It was found out that children under school age, irrespective of sex, more accurately estimated the extreme durations in the internal range (1 and 10 sec). In contrast to girls, boys reveal a clear-cut tendency to minimize the variability of assessments with age. Nevertheless, this tendency is not related with the attention level.