Time

Infancy

By using techniques such as examining whether infants vary their looking patterns dependent on event duration and measuring changes in brain activity, it has been established that even from birth, infants can keep track of the duration of events in the milliseconds-to-seconds range. This finding suggests that infants are born with a built-in timing system, and this system seems to share important properties with that of older children and adults. However, there is considerable debate over how this timing system operates and whether it makes sense to think of it as a specialized internal clock. Infants are able to link the duration of events with other types of information about magnitude. For example, they associate more time with more space or a larger number of events, even from birth. Thus, even if there is a specialized internal clock, the processes involved in estimating different types of magnitude (duration, size, and numerousness) are interlinked in some way.

Childhood and Adolescence

Although newborn babies have some sensitivity to event duration, timing abilities improve with development across infancy and childhood. It is not until late childhood that timing is as precise in children as it is in adults, although this developmental improvement cannot be straightforwardly interpreted in terms of an internal clock becoming more sensitive or reliable. Rather, other types of thinking skills may have an impact on timing abilities, particularly attentional processes that undergo substantial developmental changes as the brain matures.

Accurate timing depends on appropriately paying attention to the event that one is timing, and children and adolescents who have difficulties with attention (such as those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are known to also have problems keeping track of information about event duration. Although adolescents without attentional difficulties are typically as accurate as adults in timing events, their timing judgments may be affected by the nature of the activities in which they are engaged. Adolescents underestimate the time they spend immersed in playing a video game in comparison to a time period during which they have been reading. This underestimation is particularly likely to occur among adolescents who are highly game inclined.

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