A team from Inserm (National Institute for Health and Medical Research) wondered when and how children acquire these temporal units. The co-author of this study, Georges Dellatolas, specialist in child neuropsychology, said:“Until now, this question had been little explored. Most of the experiments had mainly evaluated the ability of children to reproduce or classify time intervals of less than one minute. »
For its study, Inserm asked 57 girls and 47 boys between the ages of 6 and 11 attending school in the Paris region. Above all, the goal was to assess the knowledge of time of these children. Then, to determine the link between their knowledge of time and different digital skills.
The researchers then found four factors, allowing the acquisition of large units of time. The first is the academic knowledge of numbers:being able to read, write and calculate them. Then, the ability to match a number to a distance. The third is the acquisition of a working memory. And finally, the ability to contextualize a number.
Georges Dellatolas summarizes:“The main lesson is that this knowledge of time is mainly acquired between the ages of 6 and 8, and is closely linked to the child's digital skills. »
However, these results are only the first step of this study. Indeed, the researchers would like to refine this study, by reproducing it on a larger number of children and by age group. In addition, they will also carry out this experiment on children suffering from pathologies causing difficulties in the processing of temporal information, and in particular dyslexia, or even certain brain tumours. All this, in order to subsequently be able to “improve the care of these children, through the development of methods for acquiring the most appropriate time units. »
