Investigating the development of children’s temporal memory across the primary school years

The examination of children’s knowledge of, and memory for, temporal information is an under-researched area. In particular, very few studies have directly examined the relationship between different aspects of temporal memory. The current thesis therefore aimed to explore whether there was a relationship between short-term, episodic and semantic temporal memory for sequencing, duration and dating performance across the primary school years. Experiment 1 revealed that children’s knowledge about time was independent of their ability to order elements within an experienced event, according to both the sequence in which the elements occurred and the duration of each element. Experiment 2 expanded upon this research; children’s short-term temporal memory for sequencing and duration was found to develop independently of their knowledge about time and their episodic memory for sequencing and duration. Finally, Experiment 4 aimed to see whether there was a relationship between children’s ability to date novel events, and their knowledge about dating concepts. This study found that these two abilities were not related during development. A further aim of this thesis was to explore whether novel methods could be employed to improve children’s temporal performance. Experiment 3 found that a counting strategy could increase the accuracy of children’s short-term duration reproductions, whilst a cumulative rehearsal technique aided children’s short-term sequencing recall. Other methods to aid temporal performance were also explored in Experiment 5; while a timeline tool was not found to increase children’s ability to sequence elements within an event, using a duration timeline was an effective way for children to represent the durations between daily activities. The implications of the current findings are highlighted, whilst further avenues of research are considered.