Using Space to Remember Time

Abstract

Although we cannot see or touch time, across many cultures, we use spatialrepresentations to think about this abstract concept. Such representations help us reason and think about this abstract domain, which helps us in many realms, including but not limited to forming rich episodic memories, imagining the future, and contextualizing personally relevant events. In early childhood, memory for the temporal order of events tends to be weaker than memory for the location of those events. A potential solution to this challenge is to engage the mental timeline, a linear projection of time onto space. Although adults and older children spontaneously activate the mental timeline when remembering the order of events, the mental timeline is slow to develop, and little is known about the interaction between the development of the mental timeline and temporal memory development. Here we show that the development of a mental timeline is related to temporal memory development at 5-to-6 years of age. In two experiments, we explored how individual differences in the development of the mental timeline relate to temporal memory, and whether priming linear representations of time can improve temporal memory. In Experiment 1 we asked whether individual differences in the strength of 5- to-6-year-old children’s mental timelines predict their memory for temporal order. Linearity of children’s mental timelines predicted memory for temporal order but not memory for locations: children who spontaneously represented time linearly had significantly better temporal memory performance than children who represented time nonlinearly, but there was no difference in location memory performance. These data suggest that children may reference these spatial representations to remember temporal order. Nonetheless, children who do not have consistent mental representations of time may not spontaneously activate the mental timeline when encoding temporal order, may still benefit when encouraged to use this strategy. Experiment 2 tested if priming 5-year-old children to represent temporal order linearly strengthens temporal memory. Contrary to our prediction, there was no effect of priming condition on temporal memory performance. There are several reasons why our priming task did not have the intended effect, such as the lack of visuo-motor engagement in the activity, the short duration of visual exposure to spatial primes, and the delay resulting from the memory task in between the priming activity and the timeline task. Our future work focuses on mitigating these issues in designing an activity to successfully prime the use of a mental timeline in young children. Our results from these two experiments provide preliminary evidence that the development of the mental timeline supports the development of temporal memory and provide insight into various constraints of spatial priming activities in influencing spatial mental representations.