Aspects of Temporal Cognition in Children's Development:

Causality, Normativity, and Perspective Understanding

by Karoline Lohse
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination:2014-01-28
Date of issue:2014-02-10
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Hannes Rakoczy
Referee:Prof. Dr. Hannes Rakoczy
Referee:Prof. Dr. Michael R. Waldmann
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-4350

 

 

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Abstract

English

The dissertation focuses on three aspects of children’s temporal cognition: (1) Children’s capacity to reason about temporal and causal relations between past, present and future events was investigated. In two experiments, 4- and 6-year-olds received structurally analogous search and planning tasks that required retrospective or prospective temporal-causal reasoning, respectively. The search task was compared to a closely matched control task that did not require temporal-causal reasoning. Findings suggest that flexible temporal-causal reasoning is qualitatively different from simpler forms of temporal cognition and develops in parallel for past- and future-directed reasoning in the late preschool years. (2) Young children’s grasp of the normative dimension of future-directed thought and speech was investigated. Two studies showed that children from age 4 understand the normative outreach of such future-directed speech acts: subjects at time 1 witnessed a speaker make future-directed speech acts about/toward a hearer, either in imperative mode (“speaker, do X!”) or as a prediction (“the speaker will do X”). When at time 2 the hearer performed an action that did not match the content of the speech act at time 1, children identified the speaker as the source of a mistake in the prediction case, and the hearer as the source of the mistake in the imperative case and leveled criticism accordingly. These findings reveal an early sensitivity to the normative aspects of future-orientation. (3) Children’s skill in temporal perspective taking was investigated. To this end two tasks were newly designed in order to assess temporal perspective taking in 3 to 5 year old children. Performances in the new tasks were not correlated with children’s performance in standard perspective taking tasks from other domains (false belief reasoning, visual perspective taking). Findings from these three research projects add to our knowledge about the development of temporal cognition in children.
Keywords: Causal Reasoning; Temporal Cognition; Developmental Psychology; Normative Understanding; Perspective Taking; Mental Time Travel; Cognitive Development
 
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