The Associations between Time Comprehension and Foresight in Preschoolers

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the associations between foresight as a form of future mental time travel and time comprehensions which could be observed during the prescool-age such as duration estimation and temporal sequences. Also developing an item-choice task and time comprehension task is aimed. To decide which children would participate in this study, Ankara Developmental Screening Inventory, TIFALDI expressive and receptive language tests and Mr. Peanut Test were used. Ninety-nine children 50 of them were girls participated in this study whom were 36-41 months old, 33 children, 42-59 months old 36 children and 60-71 months old 30 children. In order to evaluate foresight, toy washing task was used which was based on long/short time memory in the same time, depending on the source of information used by the child. In order to evaluate time comprehension, duration estimation and temporal ordering tasks were used. According to results of the study, both foresight and time comprehension performances increase with age. At the same time, within the same age groups, there were no relationship between long term/short term memory based foresight performances and there were differences between time comprehensions in favor of duration estimation. The best predictive analysis method showed that foresight based on long term memory was best predicted by age and temporal ordering performance whereas foresight based on short term memory was best predicted by working memory and temporal ordering performance.

Keywords

• foresight
• duration estimation
• temporal ordering
• mental time travelling
• episodic memory