9513881 FRIEDMAN This research is concerned with early development of temporal knowledge in normal human infants. The findings will tell us how children come to adapt to an important feature of their environment, its temporal regularities. The results will complement recent discoveries about infants' knowledge of other fundamental domains, such as space, gravity, the continued existence of objects when they are hidden, and causality. As part of a broader program of research on the developmental psychology of time, this work can help us better understand the growth of temporal knowledge in children. Along with research on the psychology of time in adults, this research will help us understand how humans abstract a sense of time from the flow of experience. Knowledge of how children adapt to the temporal features of their world will be useful to practitioners who design preschool curricula and early childhood intervention programs. It will also provide comparative information about normal development that can be used by clinicians who work with children with disabilities. The focus of this research is on humans' sensitivity to temporal order in simple event sequences. Adults are highly attuned to forward vs. backward presentations of transformations that can only happen in one temporal direction: A film of liquid pouring, when viewed in reverse, is strikingly anomalous. Adults must have internalized, temporally-organized representations of how thousands of such transformations normally unfold. However, very little is known about the origins and nature of this sensitivity. Preliminary work has suggested that expectations about the temporal direction of several transformations, such as pouring a liquid or breaking an object, develop between 4 and 12 months of age. These experiments will add to these findings in a number of ways. All of the studies involve comparisons of infants' visual attention to videotapes of temporally normal and reversed or mi s-ordered events. A first experiment is designed to illuminate the role that learning plays in the development of temporal expectations by teaching infants specific, novel transformations. Two other studies will test the limits of competence in 4-month-olds, a group which has failed to show directional preferences in some studies. A fourth study will sample new transformations in order to shed light on the breadth of 8-month-olds' knowledge and on the specific features of the films that are responsible for their looking preferences. A final experiment will test whether 1-year-old infants have developed expectations of the temporal order of familiar event sequences made up of discrete actions. This evidence can reveal whether infants in the first year of life have developed representations of lengthier time patterns than have been tested to date. ***
