The Development of the Mental Timeline is Related to Temporal Memory

Although we cannot see or touch time, across many cultures, we use spatial representations to think about this abstract concept. Spatial representations of time are thought to support temporal concepts that might otherwise be difficult to represent and reason about, such as the temporal component of episodic memory. One common form of spatially representing time is the mental timeline, which is a linear projection of time onto space. Adults and older children from many cultures spontaneously activate the mental timeline when remembering the order of events. However, the mental timeline develops slowly throughout early childhood as children gain increasing experience with formal schooling and cultural artifacts. Here, we explored how individual differences in the development of American children’s mental timelines relate to their memory for temporal order (N = 96, Mage = 6.22 years). We first tested children’s memory for the order and location of events through a memory task involving short videos. We then tested children’s spontaneous spatial representations of temporal order using an open-ended timeline construction task. The linearity of children’s timeline arrangements predicted their 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 provide preliminary evidence that the development of the mental timeline may support the development of temporal memory.