The Time Sense: A Normative, Genetic Study of the Development of Time Perception

Abstract

Time has been investigated from many standpoints as a subject which has relevance to such fields as psychology, physics, philosophy, mathematics, and literature. Many of the different aspects of time have been reviewed periodically ( 1, 16). One aspect which has received relatively little attention concerns the development of the sense of time in children. Occasionally, a systematic study has investigated the child's understanding of time words and conlprehension of our conventional time system (2, 10, IS), but there has been a dearth of experimental data concerning the development of temporal concepts of children. Although an empirical approach to the study of children's understanding of temporal units and concepts has been utilized successfully by a few investigators (3, 7, S), technical problems have restricted the number and scope of these investigations. In particular, few explorations have been made of children's estimates of short standard intervals or durations. In contrast to the few empirical studies concerning the time perception of children, there have been many experimental investigations pertaining to adult temporal perception. While considerable experimental work on discrimination of short intervals or durations using the comparison and reproduction of times has been reported, reseakch on time estimation has been confined until recently to relatively long durations. Lharnon and Goldstone'' are currently investigating time estimations for a short auditory duration, 1.0 sec., as a method of studying the psychological aspects of time perception. The results obtained from their initial study of a normative group of adults indicated that the Second Estimation Point (SEP) for normal adulcs was consistently less than the physical unit. Preliminary findings have suggested that this approach to the measurement of experienced time or apparent duration provides a technique sufficiently reliable and sensitive to differentiate between normal adulcs and various psychiatric groups ( 12 ) . The purpose of this study was to investigate an aspect of the development of time perception in children by obtaining estimates of short durations utilizing a method which would permit quantitative derivation of the limits of accuracy and variability of each child's judgments of 1.0 sec. This period of time was used so that each child's concept of a second could be compared