Development of time knowledge in childhood

Abstract

Time is an integral part of human life, a necessary source of information for identifying events and their causal relationships, for organizing one’s own activity and its synchronization with other people, for better understanding and more effective interaction with the environment. Understanding one’s past, present and future is at the core of personality development. Therefore, the study of time is an actual field in modern psychology, including develop- mental psychology. This article examines the development of children’s conceptions of time, starting from a primitive sense of time that is characteristic even for newborns, primarily along several lines of development: understanding of duration, discovering the “location” of an event on the timeline, and awareness of oneself as moving or being at some point in time. The development of representations of time is considered in relationship to other aspects of child development, such as cognitive processes and the influence of nurture.