Children, Space, and Time (04-06-10)

Cassanto and his colleagues have determined that children use space to understand the passage of time, just as adults do.  This finding is consistent with other research reported in this blog on embodied cognition.  Periods of time are categorized as long or short, for example, just as distances are.  Specifically, in this study when children judged the distance of a race between two snails, time was ignored.  When judging time, distances were not ignored and snails traveling longer distances were perceived to have journeyed for a longer time, even though that was not actually the case.  The fact that children and adults use distance to asses the passage of time, has implications for the design of circulation paths, particularly as they relate to activities that are being encouraged or discouraged.

Daniel Cassanto, Olga Fotakopoulou, and Lera Boroditsky.  2010.  “Space and Time in the Child’s Mind:  Evidence for a Cross-Dimensional Asymmetry.”  Cognitive Science, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 387-405.