The subjective duration of time depends on the number of pulses that have accumulated (since the beginning of the stimulus). It consists of a pacemaker, continuously emitting pulses (ticking), which are stored in an accumulator. They modelled a mechanism for measuring time, a sort of internal clock. On the basis of our early ability to estimate passing time, researchers suggested in 1963 that time as perceived by our brains (subjective time) was synchronised with the ticking of an internal clock, in much the same way as our daily life is governed by the ticking of our watch (objective time). At the age of eight, children start counting time on their own, keeping cadence, but not till they are 10 will they count time regularly and of their own accord, without input from an adult," Droit-Volet says. But their counting does not really keep pace with the seconds. "A five-year-old cannot count the passing of time, but can do so if prompted by an adult. One way of improving accuracy is by counting time. So children suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder find it hard to gauge time correctly. But they must also memorise a stream of time-data without losing concentration. To gauge the time required for a task they must pay attention to it. The awareness of time improves during childhood as children's attention and short-term memory capacities develop, a process dependent on the slow maturation of the prefrontal cortex. "They begin to realise that a single time continuum exists separately from individual actions," she adds. At the age of five or six a child is able to transpose the duration it has learned to associate with a particular action (pressing a rubber ball) to another (pulling on a lever). "For a three-year-old, time is multifaceted, specifically related to each action," Droit-Volet explains. They are only able to estimate time correctly if they are made to pay attention to it, experiencing time in terms of how long it takes to do something. Very young children "live in time" before gaining an awareness of its passing. "They react, become agitated or cry, when something they expect does not occur on time: when the mobile over their bed stops turning earlier than usual, when their mother takes too long preparing a feed," she adds. "From infancy onwards babies must come to grips with a world marked by recurrent time patterns, learning the length of time, or duration, associated with the various actions they experience every day," says Professor Sylvie Droit-Volet, at the Social and Cognitive Psychology Laboratory (Lapsco) at Blaise Pascal University, Clermont Ferrand, France.
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