About Childhood Development and the Understanding of Time
In the Guardian Article “A Stopwatch on the Brain’s Perception of Time”, Marc Gozlan says, “Very young children ‘live in time’ before gaining an awareness of its passing. They are only able to estimate time correctly if they are made to pay attention to it, experiencing time in terms of how long it takes to do something. ‘For a three-year-old, time is multifaceted, specifically related to each action,’ Droit-Volet explains. At the age of five or six a child is able to transpose the duration it has learned to associate with a particular action (pressing a rubber ball) to another (pulling on a lever). ‘They begin to [realize] that a single time continuum exists separately from individual actions,’ she adds.
The awareness of time improves during childhood as children’s attention and short-term memory capacities develop, a process dependent on the slow maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To gauge the time required for a task they must pay attention to it. But they must also [memorize] a stream of time-data without losing concentration. So children suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder find it hard to gauge time correctly.”
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