How Do Children Construct a Concept of Age?

Acquiring an adult-like understanding of age involves coordinating knowledge across several domains of abstract content (e.g., time, number, biology). In the present study, we explored children’s early understanding of age and how it is informed by features including size, facial and bodily morphology, and numerical knowledge. Across two pre-registered experiments, we tested 215 3- to 5-year-old children on their identification of which of two figures is older. Like previous studies, we found that children often confound age with size. However, we also found that this tendency was eliminated when children were provided with less extreme differences in size, had access to information regarding numerical age, or when facial and bodily cues to age were more pronounced. We also found that, overall, children’s age judgments were related to their mastery of number words, suggesting a role for numeracy in understanding age. These results suggest that, rather than conflating age with size, children use multiple converging cues to reason about age beginning early in development.