Comparison of diachronic thinking and event ordering in 5- to 10-year-old children

Abstract

Two main theoretical constructs seek to describe the elaborated sense of time that may be a uniquely human attribute: diachronic thinking (the ability to think about the past and use that information to predict future events) and event ordering (the ability to sequence events in temporal order). Researchers utilize various tasks to measure the emergence and refinement of diachronic thinking and event ordering in children and to document significant development in these skills during middle childhood. The current study investigated the relationship between performance on tasks of diachronic thinking and event ordering in 90 children (5;0–10;10) to determine whether these tasks tap overlapping cognitive processes. Specifically, we examined the extent to which the various measures were inter-correlated and related to measures of language and intelligence. A principal-components analysis yielded two factors. Factor 1 was positively associated with all measures, including age, language, and intelligence. Factor 2 (uncorrelated with age, language, and intelligence) distinguished the synthesis task from spatial and labeling tasks. Overall, results suggest that diachronic thinking and event ordering are not unified constructs. Rather, the multiple measures designed to assess these constructs tap into somewhat different ways of keeping track of time, and are distinguished by the extent to which they rely on knowledge of conventional time patterns and require flexibility in manipulating and synthesizing temporal sequences. Implications for how researchers conceptualize and assess time concepts are discussed and directions for future research are outlined.

Keywords

childhood development knowledge middle childhood

Suddendorf and Corballis (2007) contend that the ability to escape the present moment (i.e., by reflecting on the past and using that information to predict the future) is a cognitive tool that has played an important role in human evolution. This elaborated sense of time appears to be uniquely human, and may enable humans to think in more cognitively advanced ways than other species (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). Children’s ability to think about the future is thought to emerge between the ages of 3 and 5 (Atance & O’Neill, 2005b; Suddendorf & Busby, 2005), and to increase gradually with age (e.g., Atance & Meltzoff, 2005, 2006; Atance & O’Neill, 2001, 2005a, 2005b; Carlson, Moses, & Claxton, 2004; Fabricius, 1988; Hudson & Fivush, 1991; Hudson, Shapiro, & Sosa, 1995; Moore, Barresi, & Thompson, 1998; Suddendorf & Busby, 2005; Thompson, Baressi, & Moore, 1996), undergoing refinement in middle childhood (Boucher, Pons, Lind, & Williams, 2007). The empirical literature on the development of time concepts has focused on children’s ability to remember past experiences or experimentally presented information within two broad areas: (1) diachronic concepts of tendency (imagining prior events leading up to a depicted moment in time and/or to predict subsequent events), transformation (imagining how objects change over time), and synthesis (imagining how a series of discrete actions make up an event) (Montangero, 1996); and (2) event ordering (monitoring how children keep track of events in time) (Friedman, 2000). Despite the obvious overlap between these constructs, diachronic thinking has largely been assessed with open ended, Piagetian-style interview questions that utilize picture props, while the measurement of event ordering has emerged from the experimental cognitive literature and generally uses tasks that require sequencing of events (e.g., holidays, months of the year, daily activities) in forward or backward order. To our knowledge, research has not examined the relationships between these two approaches to the measurement of temporal cognition. Thus, our overarching goal was to bring together these two disparate literatures to arrive at a more unified understanding of the emergence and refinement of time conceptions in childhood. Below we briefly review major conceptualizations of and empirical approaches to studying temporal cognition, identify gaps in knowledge, and describe the rationale for the current study.

Diachronic thinking

Montangero, Pons, and colleagues’ work on temporal cognition (e.g., Montangero, 1985; Montangero & Parrat-Dayan, 1992; Montangero & Pons, 1995; Montangero, Pons, & Cattin, 2000; Montangero, Pons, & Scheidegger, 1996; Pons & Montangero, 1999; Pons, Montangero, Quadir, & Bazan, 2002) stems from a Piagetian constructivist framework (Piaget, 1966, 1977) and focuses on the concept of diachronic thinking. Montangero and colleagues (1996) proposed three components of diachronic thinking: tendency, transformation, and synthesis. Tendency refers to the ability to think “backwards” and “forwards” in time. Research reveals that tendency develops slowly but steadily from about age 7 years, with younger children tending to describe objects or situations only as they exist in the present moment, whereas older children more often make reference to past or future states of objects and situations (Montangero & Parrat-Dayan, 1992; Montangero & Pons, 1995; Montangero et al., 2000). Transformation refers to the understanding that certain entities change qualitatively over time, yet maintain their identity. Research suggests that until about 9 years of age, children tend to conceive of change mostly as quantitative, and only gradually come to understand that many entities change qualitatively as well (Maurice-Naville & Montangero, 1992; Montangero et al., 1996; Pons & Montangero, 1999; Tryphon & Montangero, 1992). The third component of diachronic thinking, synthesis, refers to the ability “to conceive of a temporal succession of states or events as compressed into a unitary whole temporally spanning the subordinate events” (Boucher et al., 2007, p. 1414). Like tendency, synthesis is rarely seen in 7-year-olds but is observed fairly consistently by age 12 (Montangero & Parrat-Dayan, 1992; Montangero et al., 2000; Pons & Montangero, 1999). Thus, research on diachronic thinking suggests that these abilities undergo substantial development and refinement during middle childhood.

Event ordering

In contrast to Montangero, Friedman (e.g., 1993, 2000, 2004, 2007) views temporal cognition as developing through participation in everyday social activities. Friedman contends that the ability to think temporally relies on repeatedly experienced events and that multiple representations of such events are used when thinking about the past and predicting the future (Friedman, 1993, 2007). Friedman (1993) suggests that there are three main types of information that adults use to remember past events: distances, locations, and order (Friedman, 1993). Adults use distances to estimate how much time has passed from the time of an event to the present. Locations of events in natural, personal, or conventional time patterns, such as the time of the day or the season of the year, help pinpoint events in time. Adults also use order to remember whether a certain event came before or after another event.

Friedman’s work on temporal cognition largely has been carried out through event ordering tasks, and he outlines three categories of codes that are used to keep track of time. First, one may represent events either semantically or in image-based ways. For example, a person may remember that something happened on a specific day of the week or during a specific month (i.e., semantically) or that something happened during the summer because it was hot outside (i.e., image-based). Second, one may use order codes to remember events (e.g., Thanksgiving comes after Halloween). Third, one may use representational systems to organize time. Because representations of long-scale time patterns emerge during middle childhood, we might expect that younger children lack a differentiated sense of the future beyond the present day. By age 10, however, children can judge distances of events up to one year in the future by using representations of the annual cycle (Friedman, 2000). Therefore, research on event ordering, like research on diachronic thinking, suggests that important developments occur during middle childhood.

Friedman (1977, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1993, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005) and colleagues (Friedman, Gardner, Zubin, 1995; Friedman & Kemp, 1998; Friedman & Lyon, 2005) have conducted many studies to determine how children construct time concepts during the period of middle childhood. Friedman’s (1977, 1989) research indicates that from the ages of 6 to 8, the ability to order the days of the week, seasons, holidays, and months of the year is consolidated. Additionally, at 5 years of age children can represent events spatially in a consistent and correct manner (e.g., by positioning one event in front of another), and by age 10 they can mentally move forward through these elements from different positions in a temporal cycle.

In a series of experiments investigating event ordering in young children, Fivush and Mandler (1985) asked 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds to sequence pictures of events in forward or backward order, and they found several developmental trends. Older children performed better than younger children, and all children performed better on tasks when the events were familiar. They suggested that “children must be able to understand the organization of the presented sequence in order to be able to use that organization to guide the subsequent sequencing tasks” (Fivush & Mandler, 1985, p. 1444). Their research suggests that the ability to organize events emerges in the preschool years, but children do not develop the ability to think about past events in order to predict future events, or to mentally move forward and backward in time until middle childhood.

Goals of the study

Previous research, reviewed above, has outlined two general methods for measuring temporal cognition and the developmental trajectory of this important ability—diachronic thinking and event ordering. Using previously validated tasks (Boucher et al., 2007; Friedman, 2000), as well as some novel tasks (adapted from Fivush & Mandler, 1985), the current study attempts to integrate these two approaches to the assessment of temporal cognition. A related goal was to uncover dimensions across which the tasks diverge or converge (e.g., whether tasks requiring knowledge of conventional time patterns load together). The reviewed literature suggests that temporal cognition abilities emerge during the preschool years and undergo substantial development and refinement during middle childhood. Previous studies revealed ceiling effects in older children’s performance on tasks of temporal cognition and considerable variability in children’s performance on diachronic thinking tasks; therefore, 5- to 10-year-old children were selected to participate in the current study. Additionally, participants were split into two groups, 5–7-year-olds and 8–10-year-olds, due to the developmental transition between the ages of 5 and 7 years in which there is thought to be increased capacities for strategic and controlled self-regulation, inhibition, attention, planning, and reflection (Sameroff & Haith, 1996).

A related study goal was to investigate the relationship between time concepts and aspects of language ability and intelligence. Friedman (2007) has argued that there are multiple ways in which children keep track of time and that episodic memories are reached by mentally traveling through temporally organized representations. Nelson (2007a) further emphasized the influences of language development, the sharing of information about past and future experiences with others, and cultural practices on mental time travel ability. Through verbally sharing information about their experiences with others (i.e., through reminiscing and planning), children organize (i.e., synthesize) their understanding of events and begin to recognize time concepts (Nelson, 1996, 2007b). Utilizing this perspective, the current study will be the first to investigate relationships among tasks of diachronic thinking, event ordering, and verbal and intellectual skills. Given the importance of the human capacity to conceptualize time, it is hoped that the current research will join together disparate ways of thinking about and studying time concepts in children and reveal cognitive processes that underlie the various tasks utilized to measure temporal cognition.

Method

Participants

Participants were 90 children between the ages of 5 and 10 divided into two age groups. The younger group (5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds), consisted of 44 children, 21 girls and 23 boys (M age = 6;7, SD = 0.93), and the older group (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds), consisted of 46 children, 25 girls and 21 boys (M = 9;5, SD = 0.85). Almost half the participants in each group were recruited from a small, rural town in southwest Arkansas, and the remainder was recruited from the New York City area. As shown in Table 1, each group displayed normal linguistic ability (as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Fourth Edition, PPVT-4) and nonverbal intelligence (as measured by the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence, Third Edition, TONI-3). Participation took place in the children’s homes or in classrooms at an urban, public college and required two visits, each lasting approximately one hour. Two testers carried out the assessments. Parental consent was obtained as well as child assent. Each participant received a $20 gift card for his or her participation.

Table 1.

Mean standardized and raw scores for standardized clinical tests for younger and older children.

Age Group	Age in Months	PPVT-4 Standard	PPVT-4 Raw	TONI-3 Standard	TONI-3 Raw
Total (n = 90)	97 (20)	107 (14)	137 (29)	105 (15)	17 (8)
5–7 ( n = 44)	79 (11)	104 (13)	115 (21)	104 (14)	12 (6)
8–10 ( n = 46)	113 (10)	109 (16)	158 (20)	106 (16)	21 (7)

Note. Data are mean (SD).

Materials

In this section we provide a brief description of the measures used to evaluate verbal and nonverbal intelligence, diachronic thinking, and event ordering. Appendix A provides additional information about the calculation of standardized scores for the standardized tests of verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and the task instructions and scoring procedures for the diachronic thinking and event ordering tasks. Appendix B provides a list of the tasks and their sources. For the purpose of statistical analyses, composite scores were created: the first three were related to diachronic thinking: tendency, transformation, and synthesis. The other five were related to event ordering: spatial, labeling time concepts, forward ordering, backward ordering, and relative order. Description of the procedures for calculating composite scores is provided in Appendix A. (Appendices A and B are available as online-only supplemental material that can be accessed at jbd.sagepub.com/supplemental.)

Standardized tests of verbal and nonverbal intelligence

The PPVT-4, Form B (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) was administered on the first day of testing. The PPVT-4 measures receptive vocabulary skills and can also be used to estimate verbal intellectual ability (Dunn & Dunn, 2007). The TONI-3 (Brown, Sherbenou, & Johnsen, 1997), also administered on the first day of testing, is a language-free assessment of nonverbal intelligence and reasoning abilities. The TONI-3 focuses on two major components of intelligence: abstract reasoning and problem solving.

Diachronic thinking tasks

A battery of tasks was used to measure diachronic thinking. These tasks were administered and scored in a fixed order to be consistent with the section labeled Phase 2 in Boucher and colleagues (2007) study.

Tendency, Part 1

This task measured participants’ ability to draw non-temporal references. Participants viewed a beach scene (Figure 1) and explained what was happening in the picture (Boucher et al., 2007, pp. 1420–1421).

Figure 1.

Man at the beach (Boucher et al., 2007, p. 1417).

Tendency, Part 2

Participants viewed the beach scene and noted: 1) the season (i.e., summer/winter); 2) whether or not the surfer was a child or an adult; 3) why the man was lying on the towel; and 4) why the man brought an umbrella.

Tendency, Part 3

Materials used were the beach scene and a blank sheet of 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inch) paper. The researcher placed the blank paper on one side of the beach scene and asked what the participant would draw if he or she could add something to each side of the picture.

Tendency, Part 4

Materials used were the beach scene and six line drawings (Figure 2). Participants placed them in temporal order.

Figure 2.

Man at the beach’s past and future activities (Boucher et al., 2007, p. 1422).

Transformation, Part 1

Participants were instructed to draw a picture of a tree. The researcher then asked the participant whether he or she knew about the “whole life of a tree.” The researcher then placed two additional sheets of paper to the left and right of the first sheet and asked the participant to draw the whole life of the tree (i.e., how it looked before and after the tree in the child’s drawing).

Transformation, Part 2

Participants viewed a drawing of a mature tree. The researcher then showed the participant a set of four additional drawings of different stages of a tree’s life (Figure 3). Participants were instructed to place the drawings in the order of stages of a tree’s life.

Figure 3.

The whole life of a tree.

Synthesis

Participants viewed six drawings (Figure 4). After the researcher placed the drawings in order and explained what was going on in each one, the researcher gathered the drawings and asked the participant what he or she would title a book if these pictures were the pictures in the book.

Figure 4.

Synthesis (Boucher et al., 2007, p. 1418).

Event ordering tasks

These event ordering tasks were taken from Friedman (2000) or adapted from Fivush and Mandler (1985). First, the researcher asked participants to think about the past, present, and future by asking them to tell the examiner something that happened a long time ago, something they would do soon, and something that will happen in the future. This task (“Naming past and future events”) was considered a control task and was not scored.

Spatial task

First, the researcher introduced participants to thinking about things spatially by giving them a picture-pointing task in which they viewed a picture of a road going through some hills. This control task demonstrated how to use the picture to mark events spatially in time (i.e., to distinguish events that are near versus far away in time) and was not scored. See Appendix A for more details about the control task.

After completing the control task, the child viewed seven stimulus cards (i.e., depicting Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, summer, dinner time, and sitting in a classroom) in random order. Participants were instructed to place each card on the picture of the road (i.e., near versus far away) to represent when the holiday would occur in time.

Labeling time concepts task

This task was a replication of Friedman’s (2000) Months of the Holidays task. Its purpose was to determine whether or not children know when important events occur throughout the year. Participants viewed the same stimulus cards used in the Spatial task (without the dinner and classroom cards), and were asked to name the month in which each event occurred. Questions were presented in counterbalanced order.

The Forward Order experimental task included three items: the Daily Script Task (Forward Order, Part 1 and 2), inspired by Fivush and Mandler (1985), and Friedman’s (2000) Holiday-order task (Forward Order, Part 3). Friedman’s (2000) task was unaltered, but Fivush and Mandler’s (1985) task was altered. Children in the age group studied can remember the sequence of four familiar events, as Fivush and Mandler’s results suggest; therefore, 12 events were used for this age group.

Daily Script Task (Forward Order, Part 1)

This control task oriented participants to the script/order tasks. The researcher introduced four 4 x 6 inch color photographs of a child making his breakfast. The events depicted in the pictures were: 1) taking out supplies; 2) pouring cereal; 3) pouring milk; and 4) eating cereal. Participants were instructed to place the photographs in forward order.

Daily Script Task (Forward Order, Part 2)

In this experimental task, participants placed twelve 102 × 152 mm (4 x 6 inch) colored photographs depicting events in a child’s typical day in forward order. The 12 events were: 1) waking up; 2) getting dressed; 3) eating breakfast; 4) going out the door of his apartment; 5) sitting in a classroom; 6) going inside the door of his apartment; 7) eating dinner; 8) getting ready to take a bath; 9) putting on his pajamas; 10) brushing his teeth; 11) having a bedtime story read to him; and 12) sleeping. The children heard the following story: “I have some more pictures of Zane. We are going to pretend that this is what he does every day. He wakes up in the morning and then puts on his clothes. Next, he eats breakfast and then goes out the door. He sits in class at school and then walks home and goes inside his house. After that, he eats dinner. Then he has a bath, puts on his pajamas, and brushes his teeth. Finally, his mom reads a bedtime story to him, and he falls asleep.” Next, the researcher placed the photographs in random order and asked participants to put them in the correct forward sequence.

Holiday-order task (Forward Order, Part 3)

The children again viewed the stimulus cards representing Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, summer, and Christmas in a circular arrangement (Friedman, 2000), and were instructed to place them in temporal order.

Daily Script Task (Backward Order, Part 1)

The researcher asked: “Do you remember how Zane eats his breakfast? I want you to look at these pictures again and put them in backward order the way that it really happens. Place what happens last right here.” The researcher pointed to the left of the participant and stated: “Place what happens right before that here, and so on.”

Daily Script Task (Backward Order, Part 2)

This task utilized the same 12 photographs from the Forward Order task, Part 2. The researcher shuffled the photos to ensure that they were in random order. She then reminded participants of the event that each photograph represented before asking participants to place them in the correct backward sequence.

Relative order

This experimental task included the Daily Events Task (Relative Order task, Parts 1 and 2), inspired by Fivush and Mandler (1985), and the Holiday-relative-order task and Month-relative-order task (Relative Order, Parts 3 and 4), which were taken (unaltered) from Friedman (2000). The Daily Events Task (Relative Order, Part 1) used the four pictures of a boy eating cereal, pouring milk, pouring cereal, or getting out his supplies. For each trial there was a reference event and two choices. Two examples are: 1) Pouring Cereal: Eating Cereal or Getting Out Supplies; and 2) Getting Out Supplies: Pouring Cereal or Pouring Milk. Participants were told: “Think about Zane eating breakfast. Tell me the event that will come next after (or before) this.” For each problem, the picture representing the starting event was placed slightly to the left of the participant and the two choice events just to its right, one above the other (with position randomly varied). The participant was told, “Let’s pretend it’s _____ (starting event; the tester pointed to this event). Which of these two happens next/before? Which is closer to _____ (starting event) if we go forward/backward in time (pointing to the two choices)?” Participants were asked six questions, three were forward order and three were backward order. Participant responses were scored as correct or incorrect.

Daily Events Task (Relative Order, Part 2)

This utilized the 12 pictures of a boy’s daily activities. The procedure was the same as the Relative Order task discussed above.

Holiday-relative-order task (Relative Order task, Part 3)

This used pictures depicting major holidays; the procedure was the same as the previous two Relative Order tasks.

Month-relative-order task (Relative Order task, Part 4)

This replicated Friedman’s (2000) study. Eight months, two randomly selected from each quarter of the calendar year, were used as reference points. The children were asked whether a month that occurs 4 months later or a month that occurs 8 months later comes next in the year. The eight problems were presented in one of 24 random orders, with the order of mention of the two choices randomly varied.

Overview of statistical analyses

We first calculated inter-rater reliability for scoring of all standardized and experimental tasks. As preliminary analyses, we compared older and younger children on the PPVT-4 and TONI-3 to ascertain whether the two age groups were comparable with respect to their standardized scores. Next, we compared the accuracy for measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering, using arcsine transformed proportions of correct responses as the dependent variable. We compared accuracy for the younger and older children across tasks, and additionally compared diachronic thinking and event ordering tasks for levels of difficulty. These analyses provided confirmation that the measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering showed the age-related improvements documented in the literature.

Next, we computed Pearson correlation coefficients controlling for age in months between the measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering. To test whether measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering tapped into the same overarching construct of temporal cognition, we conducted a principal components factor analysis to find underlying variance components among the measures. Finally, we conducted a multiple regression analysis with the principal components as criterion variables and age in months, verbal ability, and nonverbal intelligence as predictor variables.

Results

Data from the 90 participants were scored by a single rater; a second rater scored data from a randomly selected 10 participants. Inter-rater reliability was calculated using the intra-class correlation coefficient (Shrout & Fleiss, 1979). The observed inter-rater reliability scores ranged from .94 to 1.00, with all reliability scores significant at p < .001. Thus, raters did not significantly differ in their scoring of the tasks.

Table 1 presents the mean standardized and raw scores for standardized clinical tests of receptive vocabulary/verbal development (PPVT-4) and nonverbal intelligence (TONI-3), for younger and older children. Children of ages 5–7 years did not differ from children of ages 8–10 years with respect to standardized scores for PPVT-4, t (88) = 1.4, ns, or TONI-3, t (88) = .6, ns. Thus, younger and older children were comparable with respect to standardized scores for verbal development and nonverbal intelligence. Table 2 presents accuracy (percent correct) on measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering for children of ages 5–7 years and 8–10 years. On all of the measures, younger children had significantly lower scores than older children, all values of t > 2.5, all p values < .05. Thus, we replicated the age-related improvements in diachronic thinking and event ordering (Boucher et al. 2007; Fivush & Mandler, 1985; Friedman, 2000).

Table 2.

Accuracy (i.e., % correct) on measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering for younger and older children, with t-tests comparing age groups.

Task	Total (n = 90)	5–7 year olds ( n = 44)	8–10 year olds ( n = 46)	T
Tendency	59.9 (18.4)	52.6 (19.3)	67.0 (14.4)	3.95***
Transformation	73.1 (25.3)	59.5 (26.4)	86.1 (15.6)	5.63***
Synthesis	80.6 (29.7)	72.7 (33.2)	88.0 (24.0)	2.52*
Spatial	80.0 (16.6)	75.3 (15.9)	84.5 (16.2)	2.86**
Labeling Time Concepts	73.1 (22.7)	62.2 (23.2)	83.5 (16.7)	4.81***
Forward Ordering:
Daily Script	80.9 (23.5)	73.7 (26.7)	87.7 (17.7)	2.77**
Holidays	66.9 (37.6)	56.8 (37.1)	76.6 (35.9)	2.62*
Backward Ordering:
Daily Script	63.7 (32.4)	49.7 (32.5)	77.2 (26.3)	4.57***
Relative Order:
Daily Script	86.7 (12.6)	80.3 (12.7)	92.7 (9.1)	5.47***
Holidays and Months	82.2 (16.9)	71.7 (15.5)	92.3 (11.0)	7.32***

Note. Data are mean (SD).

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

With regards to the level of difficulty of the various tasks, there was no evidence that diachronic thinking tasks were generally more difficult than event ordering tasks. Nevertheless, there were considerable task differences: the three diachronic tasks (tendency, transformation, synthesis) differed significantly in accuracy, with tendency proving to be the most challenging task and synthesis the easiest, all values of t > 3.1, all p values < .01. Two of the Friedman tasks, spatial and labeling time concepts, had levels of difficulty nearly identical to the synthesis and transformation tasks; labeling time concepts proved to be a more challenging task than the spatial task, t(89) = 3.8, p < .001.

With regards to the event ordering tasks, forward ordering involving holidays proved to be more difficult than forward ordering of daily events, t(89) = 2.7, p = .009; a similar trend for relative ordering tasks failed to reach statistical significance, t(89) = 1.7, p = .100. The three daily script tasks (forward, backward, relative ordering) varied in difficulty, with backward ordering being more difficult than either forward, or relative ordering, all values of t > 5.4, all p values < .001. Whereas forward and relative ordering of the daily script were of comparable difficulty, t(89) < 1, p = .596, relative ordering of holidays/months proved easier than forward ordering of holidays, t(89) = 2.8, p = .007.

Next, we computed Pearson correlation coefficients (controlling for age) to examine relationships between each of the measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering. As shown in Table 3, the diachronic thinking tasks tended to correlate with one another, with the exception of transformation and synthesis, which failed to reach statistical significance. All of the diachronic thinking tasks correlated with the backward ordering task; additionally, tendency and synthesis correlated with relative ordering, whereas tendency correlated with the spatial task. Spatial and labeling tasks correlated highly with one another; whereas both of these tasks correlated with relative ordering of holidays and months, the labeling task additionally correlated with each of the ordering tasks involving the daily script. With regards to the ordering tasks: significant correlations between daily script tasks were found, as well as between holiday/month tasks. Forward ordering involving holidays failed to correlate with any of the daily script tasks; in contrast, relative ordering of holidays/months correlated with the daily scripts tasks, although just missing statistical significance for backward ordering.

Table 3.

Partial correlations (controlling for age in months) between scores on measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering.

	Transformation	Synthesis	Spatial	Labeling	Forward: Daily	Forward: Holiday	Backward: Daily	Relative: Daily	Relative: Holiday/Month
Tendency	.34***	.21*	.07	.07	.15	.07	.30**	.33**	.18
Transformation	–	.17	.36***	.20^†	.16	.03	.29**	.10	.19
Synthesis		–	-.01	-.06	.37***	.14	.22*	.23*	.29**
Spatial			–	.59***	.19	-.06	.20^†	.15	.21*
Labeling				–	.27**	.12	.25*	.22*	.46***
Forward: Daily					–	.11	.44***	.40***	.21*
Forward: Holiday						–	.12	.15	.34***
Backward: Daily							–	.44***	.20^†
Relative: Daily								–	.33**
Relative: Holiday/Month									–

^† p < .06, *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

Given the proliferation of measures of temporal cognition in the literature, the main goal of this study was to determine whether various measures, emerging from disparate theoretical literatures, are indices of the same underlying abilities. The principal components analysis examined the dimensionality of the measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering, and yielded two factors with eigenvalues greater than 1. The first factor accounted for 45.8% of the item variance, and the second factor accounted for 10.8% of the item variance. Table 4 presents item loadings exceeding .30 for each factor. Factor 1 loaded positively with all of the tasks whereas Factor 2 distinguished the synthesis task, which loaded positively on this factor, from spatial and labeling tasks, which loaded negatively on this factor.

Table 4.

Item loadings of the principal components analysis.

Task	Factor 1	Factor 2
Tendency	.61	–
Transformation	.66	–
Synthesis	.53	.54
Spatial	.60	−.66
Labeling Time Concepts	.71	−.51
Forward: Daily	.66	–
Forward: Holiday	.44	–
Backward: Daily	.74	–
Relative: Daily	.77	–
Relative: Holiday/Month	.79	–

To evaluate the relationship between the two factors and aspects of language and intelligence, we conducted regression analyses with Factors 1 and 2 as outcome measures and age (in months), and PPVT-4 and TONI-3 (standardized scores) as predictors. All three predictors were entered simultaneously and results are presented in Table 5. Overall, the first model was statistically significant, F(3, 86) = 43.1, p < .001, whereas the second model was not significant, F(3, 86) = .62, p = .60. As shown in Table 4, Factor 1 was strongly linked to age, receptive vocabulary, and nonverbal intelligence, whereas Factor 2, which distinguished among the measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering, was independent of age, receptive vocabulary, and nonverbal intelligence.

Table 5.

Standardized regression coefficients (Beta) obtained from multiple regression analysis with principal components as criterion variables and age (months), PPVT-4, and TONI-3 (standardized scores) as predictor variables.

	Factor 1	Factor 2
Age in months	.65***	−.01
PPVT-4	.17*	−.10
TONI-3	.27***	−.08
R² total	.60	.02
model F	43.1***	.62

*p < .05, ***p < .001.

Discussion

This study investigated the degree to which performance on tasks of diachronic thinking and event ordering were interrelated in a sample of 5- to 10-year-old children. This study is, to our knowledge, the first to administer a comprehensive set of Friedman-style event ordering tasks to this age group along with verbal and nonverbal intelligence measures. We explored the factors underlying performance on the temporal cognition tasks and the relationship between task performance and language ability and nonverbal intelligence. Across the various tasks, we found significant age-related improvements in performance, which replicated the results of others (Boucher et al., 2007; Friedman, 2000; Montangero, Pons, et al., 1992, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2002). Although we failed to find any evidence that diachronic thinking tasks were generally more difficult than event ordering tasks, the tendency task of diachronic thinking proved to be more difficult than the other tasks, with only 67% accuracy achieved for the older group of 8- to 10-year-olds—a finding that suggests the need to include older children in future research. In discussing our findings, we return to the main theoretical and empirical questions posed in the introduction.

Are current conceptualizations of diachronic thinking and event ordering describing distinct components of temporal cognition?

All of our measures were significantly correlated with each other with one exception: the measure of synthesis was not significantly correlated with either the spatial or labeling time concepts tasks. Whereas the synthesis task required participants to create a title for a set of pictures about a day at the beach, both the spatial and labeling time concepts required familiarity with names of holidays and their locations in conventional time patterns. Thus, the ability to envision and name an event given a set of distinct sub-events (i.e., moments in time) was unrelated to knowledge of conventional time patterns (e.g., that one will experience summer before Halloween, or that Halloween is in the month of October). This lack of a relationship is evidence that at least one aspect of diachronic thinking (synthesis) is distinct from Friedman’s measures of event ordering.

Our principal components analysis of the three composite measures of diachronic thinking and the five composite measures of event ordering revealed two factors. Factor 1 was positively related to all tasks. Regression analyses indicated that this factor was linked to age in months as well as both verbal ability and nonverbal intelligence (see Table 4). Thus, Factor 1 appeared to be an index of general developmental changes in intelligence (verbal and nonverbal) that were linked to performance across diachronic thinking and event ordering tasks; see Table 1 for correlations between nonverbal and verbal intelligence and measures of diachronic thinking and event ordering. Factor 2, in contrast, was uncorrelated with age, verbal ability, and intelligence, but distinguished among the time tasks. Among the diachronic thinking measures, tendency and synthesis loaded more similarly to one another than the transformation task, as they required knowledge about the forward ordering of events. Among the event ordering measures, tasks requiring memory of forward, backward, and relative temporal order loaded similarly to one another. Distinct from the temporal order measures, tasks involving the use of space to represent time loaded similarly to a labeling of time concepts task further distinguishing types of tasks that required knowledge of conventional time patterns. Factor 2 clearly distinguished the tendency and synthesis tasks of diachronic thinking (with positive weights) from the spatial and labeling time concepts tasks of event ordering (with negative weights). The former tasks are thought to require an ability to think backwards and forwards across time, and to conceive of a succession of states as a unitary whole, whereas the latter tasks require recognition of holiday names and their locations in conventional time patterns (months of the year). Interestingly, forward, backward, and relative ordering tasks did not load distinctly in the Principal Components Analysis as a function of their reliance on knowledge of conventional time patterns, although the tasks that involved ordering holidays and months proved to be somewhat more difficult than tasks that involved ordering of daily events.

What are the relationships between language and the ability to keep track of time?

Factor 1, which loaded positively with all measures of temporal cognition, was significantly predicted by verbal abilities, as estimated using standardized PPVT scores, over and above the effects of age and nonverbal intelligence (TONI scores). This link with receptive vocabulary scores provides support for the view that temporal cognition is supported by advances in language development. Nelson (1996, 2007a) contends that it is through verbally sharing information about one’s experience that children acquire an ability to express the significance and timing of events in their lives. In particular, through participation in verbally mediated transactions, children develop strategies for keeping track of moments in time, for remembering their own personal past and for projecting themselves into the future.

At approximately 18 months, children begin to use words that refer to the past (Nelson & Ross, 1980). As parents talk about experienced events, their children begin to learn the words that describe their experiences. By age 3, children are able to give more extended and coherent accounts of their past experiences (Fivush, Gray, & Fromhoff, 1987), but the adults in their lives continue to frame the questions and provide prompts for the children’s answers (Eisenberg, 1985, Fivush et al., 1987; Hudson, 1990). Fivush and Hamond (1990) reported that pre-school children often did not pay attention to the same things as adults; adults tended to frame conversations with their children in ways that taught the children what is important to remember about events in their lives.

There is strong evidence that reminiscing about personal experiences facilitates the development of autobiographical memory, defined as “an explicit memory of an event that occurred in a specific time and place in one’s personal past” (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). As children repeatedly experience events and verbally share information about their experiences, they develop scripts, or general event representations (Nelson, 1996). These scripts help children organize information about previously experienced events and anticipate what will happen in the future by providing a framework for familiar activities. Although younger children’s scripts about events are not as complex as older children’s, scripts are gradually elaborated through a process of the child participating in verbally mediated interactions with others. Berntsen and Bohn (2010) provide support for the idea that scripts play a role in the development of abilities to keep track of time. They investigated the role of cultural life scripts for both episodic past events and episodic future thinking. Their results suggested that participants relied on information from cultural life scripts when thinking about the past and the future and that “cultural life scripts may be especially important for guiding mental time travel across longer temporal distances” (p. 275).

Through reminiscing about events with children, adults provide children with information to add to their scripts, guide children’s ability to think about events in temporal order, and teach about conventional labels and systems for keeping track of time (Nelson, 1996, 2007a, 2007b). Reminiscing about experienced events provides children with a vocabulary for talking about events in time, and for tagging when events took place or will take place (e.g., in an hour, tomorrow, Wednesday, July). It is through conversations about the events in their lives that children acquire the conventional systems for tagging events and keeping track of when events occurred or will occur; such conversations also encourage children to think about their personal pasts and futures.

Although no existing research has linked conversational practices to specific aspects of diachronic thinking, such as tendency, transformation, and synthesis, there is evidence that parent–child conversations influence children’s understanding of biological concepts in ways that may highlight similarities between humans and other animals (Rigney & Callanan, 2011). As discussed by Labrell and Stefaniak (2011), diachronic thinking provides a foundation for biological concepts, such as the growth cycle and the irreversibility of life stages (e.g., birth, maturity, death). It remains an important topic for future research to elucidate how parents structure conversations in ways that inform their children’s understanding of biological transformation—how biological processes, such as growth and illness, allow one to predict the future states of living organisms, and how biological changes reflect an individual’s life history.

How might temporal cognition develop?

Supporting previous research, our results indicated significant developmental changes in time concepts during middle childhood, with older children outperforming younger children across tasks of diachronic thinking and event ordering. Similarly, Labrell and Stephaniak (2011) reported significant improvements in diachronic thinking about the life cycle in 6–11 year olds: whereas most children at 7 years of age were able to grasp concepts of past and future life stages, serial order of life stages, and identity of individuals following biological transformations, even the oldest children performed poorly on specific aspects of the life cycle, such as grasping that the life cycle progresses in a fixed direction and cannot be reversed, and that growth may not occur at a fixed rate and may stop.

Although the literature provides numerous examples of age-related changes in temporal cognition, it lacks exploration on the topic of how or why these abilities develop. Two hypotheses about how these abilities develop need to be explored in future research. The first is that time travel is a manifestation of the episodic memory system (i.e., memory of personally experienced events, cf. Tulving, 1985a; Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). Tulving (1985b), for example, argued that there is a close relationship between episodic memory and episodic future thinking, i.e., the ability to think about personally experiencing events in the future. This hypothesis leads to the prediction that episodic memory abilities should be predictive of performance on diachronic thinking and event ordering tasks. As a preliminary step in testing this hypothesis, Moore (2011) compared children’s performance on an episodic memory test with their performance on the same battery of time tasks used here, and found no significant correlations between episodic memory and performance on any of the time tasks. However, the particular episodic memory test used (Cycowicz, Friedman, Snodgrass, & Duff, 2001) proved to be quite difficult for 5- to10-year-old children, and may not have been an ideal assessment of their memory skills. The second hypothesis is that time concepts emerge through a process of cultural learning. This hypothesis suggests the need for future research to identify ways in which developments in language, conversational exchanges about the past and future, and cultural practices influence children’s time travel abilities, and makes the prediction that cross-cultural variation in community practices will affect the timing of emergence and structure of children’s time concepts.

Conclusions

This study examined relationships among measures of temporal cognition, which have emerged from disparate theoretical models. Results suggest that Montangero’s research on diachronic thinking and Friedman’s research on event ordering are related, and that both methods of data collection ostensibly measure temporal cognition albeit via different types of task sets. A further goal was to establish the relationship between these tasks to developments in language and nonverbal intelligence. Results suggest that the various measures of temporal cognition can be distinguished by the extent to which they rely on knowledge of conventional time patterns (e.g., public holidays and the calendar system) and the extent to which they require flexibility in manipulating and synthesizing temporal sequences. Thus, one might expect that explicit training of conventional time patterns, e.g., in preschool classrooms, would improve performance on some, but not all, measures of temporal cognition. The observed links between task performance and estimates of vocabulary size appear to fit Nelson’s (1996, 2007a) view that language acquisition supports development in temporal cognition. Additionally, however, we found correlations of similar magnitude with nonverbal intelligence, which suggests that task performance depended on general intellectual abilities, such as cognitive flexibility in information processing. Future research is needed to better understand the relationship between these abilities and developments in children’s conceptualization of time.

Footnotes

Funding

This study was funded via a Graduate Student Research Grant from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Supplemental Materials

The online appendices are available at

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