Memory for the temporal order of past events is a critical capacity; however, relatively little is known about its development and the processes that support it in early to middle childhood. The aim of this study was to examine children's memory for the temporal order of real-world events. Four-five-year-old (n = 36), 6-7-year-old (n = 45) and…

The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children's inferences about their…

This study examined the relationship between young children's cognitive development and fathers' engagement in early childhood. The study examined fathers' home engagement patterns based on literacy, play, and caregiving activities when their children were 9-month-old and these patterns of engagement in 9-month-old were related to children's…

The benefits of active music participation and training for cognitive development have been evidenced in multiple studies, with this link leveraged in music therapy approaches with clinical populations. Although music, rhythm, and movement activities are widely integrated into children's play and early education, few studies have systematically…

Students today may have less time for free play, but new research suggests their imaginations have actually sharpened compared with those of children two decades ago. In an analysis published in May 2011 in the "Creativity Research Journal" and posted online in May, researchers from Case Western University in Cleveland found elementary school…

Based on Piaget's theory of logico-mathematical knowledge, 126 students in grades 2-5 were asked 6 questions about elapsed time. The main reason found for difficulty with elapsed time is children's inability to coordinate hierarchical units (hours and minutes). The educational implications drawn are that students must be encouraged to think about…

This report describes the first prospective study specifically designed to assess children's verbal memory for a unique event 6 years after it occurred. Forty-six 27- to 51-month-old children took part in a unique event and were interviewed about it twice, after 24-hr and 6-year delays. During the 6-year interview, 9 children verbally recalled the…

Recent research on children's thinking about the future has taken multiple directions, many of which are illustrated in the contributions to this special issue. In this commentary the topic is discussed in the context of research on children's understanding of time, and some of the adaptive challenges of thinking about the future are considered.…

Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas…

We analyze theoretical differences between conceptualist and minimalist approaches to episodic processing in young children. The "episodic-like" minimalism of Clayton and Dickinson (1998) is a species of the latter. We asked whether an "episodic-like" task (structurally similar to ones used by Clayton and Dickinson) in which participants had to…

According to McAuliffe and Lovell (2006), regardless of the training received in skills classes, master's level counseling students continue to be rote in their approach to clients and their use of counseling skills as opposed to understanding how skills fit into the helping process. Students also experience confusion manifested by fear, anxiety,…

Since the 1920s researchers have been studying children's temporal concepts, concluding that the concept of time is complex and difficult to teach children. This research literature review aims to provide a theoretical framework to guide future research about time-related teaching in primary school. After preliminary considerations about the…

This article reviews some recent research on the development of temporal cognition, with reference to Weist's (1989) account of the development of temporal understanding. Weist's distinction between two levels of temporal decentering is discussed, and empirical studies that may be interpreted as measuring temporal decentering are described. We…

Four studies are reported that employed an object location task to assess temporal-causal reasoning. In Experiments 1-3, successfully locating the object required a retrospective consideration of the order in which two events had occurred. In Experiment 1, 5- but not 4-year-olds were successful; 4-year-olds also failed to perform at above-chance…

This study sought to test the most efficient representation mode with which children with hearing impairment could express a story while producing connectives indicating relations of time and of cause and effect. Using Bruner's (1973, 1986, 1990) representation stages, we tested the comparative effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) as a mode of…