Daily Time-Place Learning in Young Children

Abstract

Pre-school children find it difficult to correctly report if it is morning or afternoon. The present study tested whether children could learn a non-verbal Time-Place Learning (TPL) task that depended on time of day. Twenty-five 4-year-olds were repeatedly asked to find a toy in one of two boxes. Children in the Cued condition were told the toy was in one box in the morning and in another box in the afternoon. Children in the Not Cued condition were told the toy was sometimes in one box and sometimes in the other box. After 80 trials, children were asked if it was morning or afternoon. About 65% of the children learned the TPL task, and about three-quarters of the children verbally identified if it was morning or afternoon. However, the children who learned the TPL task were not necessarily the children who correctly answered whether it was morning or afternoon, and those in the Cued condition were no more likely to solve the task than those in the Not Cued condition. The implication is that children have a sense of time that can be used to solve spatio-temporal contingencies, but does not depend on the verbal understanding of time of day.

Keywords:

• Children’s timing
• time
• Time-Place Learning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sarah Clarke, Christina Hodder, Abby Kavanagh, Erin Lynch, Kathryn McDonald, Kaylah Parsons, Ashar Pirzada, Ashley Rose, Nicole Shea, Micah Tilley and Meagan White for help with data collection. We would like to give extra thanks to the children that participated in the studies as well as the amazing staff at the Child Care Centers.

Notes

1 In all cases but three, once a child reached criterion, they stayed at criterion until the end of the experiment. Three of the children appeared to lose interest and dropped below criterion after being above criterion for at least 10 trials. To ensure that the inclusion of these three students in the Learned group did not bias the results, all subsequent analyses were also run with these three students excluded. There was no change to the pattern of results.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to CMT and DH.

Notes on contributors

Darcy Hallett

Darcy Hallett and Christina Thorpe are Associate Professors and started at Memorial University in 2007.

Cheryll L. Fitzpatrick

Cheryll L. Fitzpatrick and Aishah Bakhtiar, graduate students when this research was conducted, currently have positions at Memorial University and University of Tasmania, respectively.

Joy Clements

Joy Clements is currently a medical Doctor.

Erin Carter

Erin Carter is an Audiologist.

Christina M. Thorpe

Darcy Hallett and Christina Thorpe are Associate Professors and started at Memorial University in 2007.