From what age do children know what a minute, an hour or a year represents? It is this question that has animated researchers in child neuropsychology and population health at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) at the universities of Paris-Sud and Paris Descartes. According to their study published in the journal Journal of Experimental Child Pshycology, children would understand and use time units appropriately at an age between 6 and 8 years old.
No notion of time without digital understanding
For this study, the researchers first of all submitted a questionnaire to 57 girls and 48 boys aged 6 to 11 attending school in Île-de-France. For example, the children had to evaluate the lengths of time separating four stages of life represented in images (baby, child, adult and elderly). They also had to indicate the time displayed on clocks with drawn needles, estimate the time separating them from their next birthday or even quantify the duration of the interview spent with the researchers. To assess their digital skills, the researchers also took a number management ability to the young participants. At the end of all these tests, the researchers arrived at the following result: “[la] knowledge of time is acquired between 6 and 8 years old, and is closely linked to the digital skills of the child“explains Georges Dellatolas, co-author of the study, in a press release from Inserm. And four factors would make it possible to acquire this notion of time: “academic” knowledge of numbers, the ability to match a number to a distance, short-term working memory, and the ability to judge whether a number is high or low depending on its context.
To refine these initial results, the researchers now wish to repeat the tests on a larger number of children organized by narrower age groups. At the same time, by involving children suffering from pathology that complicates the processing of temporal information (the dyslexia in particular), scientists hope to develop methods of acquiring the notion of time that are more appropriate for these young pupils and thus improve their care.
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