Empirical work investigating children's temporal representations has included investigations of children's awareness of the past, present and future; their understanding of temporal order and their representation of duration. Previous work on children's temporal awareness leads to the question of whether children can access cognitive representations of durations in situations where the temporal aspects of the task are not made directly apparent either in the information given prior to stimulus presentation or in the subsequent question. There is very little evidence to indicate whether these representations might be accessed in the absence of any specific reference to the temporal aspects of the procedure. The empirical work in this thesis focuses on children's developing representation of duration in a procedure that avoids making specific reference to the temporal aspects of the task, in a context more closely analogous to their real world experiences where durations occur in the absence of salient prompts and cues. Results Data from over three hundred children who participated in the seven experiments in this series are encouraging and suggest that by the age of six years children do become able to differentially represent durations of 10 and 25 seconds in a procedure where no explicit reference was made to the temporal aspects of the experience, and the ability to differentially represent durations of 25 and 40 seconds, in this context, emerges later in development, at around eight years of age. 2 Conclusions This series 0 xperiments indicates that by six years of age children are able to represent durations in the absence of explicit reference to the temporal aspect of the task, and they are able to differentially represent durations of 10 and 25 seconds. Around eight years of age they are able to differentially represent durations of 25 and 40 seconds However whilst these findings indicate that children of six years and above may be able to differentially represent durations in this range.the inconsistencies in performance in the series of experiments suggest that the ability may be fragile. Whilst children in this age range are able to demonstrate the ability to code durations the limiting factors on their ability to do so in real world contexts remain unclear. Short abstract. Word count: 363.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:561120 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Milan, Stephen |
| Contributors | Dowker, Anne |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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