I found the way that children develop the concept of time to be extremely interesting while we were discussing it in class. We talked about how time includes both experiential and logical aspects. Experienced time is how long we think a particular event takes place, while logical time is produced through reasoning.
In our book it discusses experiential time and how even children as young as four months old can discriminate between two movies being run forward and backwards showing a liquid being poured into a glass. This shows that these young infants have knowledge of how our world operates and that in order for one thing to occur there is a specific process that must also occur in along with a specific time in which that process happens. “Thus, understanding of temporal order seems well established in the first year of life” (Siegler and Alibali, pg. 284). This knowledge is very important in understanding how and why our world works the way that it does.
Logical time is often harder to develop and there are people ranging in all ages including adults that still do not have this concept fully developed. Our book also talks about the single object/single motion intuition is the belief that all parts of the same object will move at the same speed when it is in motion. This is hard to explain but the race car example works well, where a race car travelling around a race track has two doors on it that are moving at different speeds, the one on the outside is moving much faster. This idea is much better realized when it is acted out in real life with examples such as two people holding on to a pole and walking in a circle, where the outside person must walk a lot faster to keep up with the inside person. Without this demonstration or other knowledge of physics logical time is a much more complex concept to fully understand.
The knowledge and understanding of time in our society is crucial. We differ in our society in that we are extremely time oriented and always must stick to a strict schedule, where other societies for instance in Mexico this time obsession is much different, they rely more on personal interactions rather than set chronological time. The development or this concept of time is therefore very important for infants to understand in our society.