The Salience of Temporal Cues in the Developing Structure of Event Knowledge

Two experiments used a novel method called Pathfinder to examine whether the salience of temporal cues embedded in event structure increases developmentally and whether people link event actions by simple adjacency relationships or embed them in an organized whole. A sequential format for eliciting...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American journal of psychology 2000-12, Vol.113 (4), p.591-619
Main Authors: Thompson, Laura A., Gomez, Rebecca L., Schvaneveldt, Roger W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Age
Age groups
Association Learning
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child Development
Child interpersonal relations
Child psychology
Children
Cognitive psychology
Cues
Development
Developmental psychology
Event sequences
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Interpersonal relations in children
Knowledge
Language Development
Learning
Male
Memory
Parents
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Problem Solving
Psychological aspects
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Referents
Saliency
Sequential information
Temporal processing
Time Perception
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Two experiments used a novel method called Pathfinder to examine whether the salience of temporal cues embedded in event structure increases developmentally and whether people link event actions by simple adjacency relationships or embed them in an organized whole. A sequential format for eliciting knowledge was compared with a less structured format for dinner and bedtime events. Adults and their 8- and 10-year-old children demonstrated well-developed script organizations regardless of format, and organization improved across this age range. In Experiment 1, temporal cues were not a salient basis of comparison for 6-year-olds, but in Experiment 2 they could use temporal cues when instructed to do so. The results suggest that temporal salience increases between 6 and 10 years and that temporal knowledge of event actions is highly organized in this age range. Furthermore, children's event knowledge functions partly in the interaction between their developing event knowledge and the support provided by sequential constraints in the environment.
ISSN:0002-9556
1939-8298
DOI:10.2307/1423474