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Children and adults rely on different heuristics for estimation of durations.

ABSTRACT: Time is a uniquely human yet culturally ubiquitous concept acquired over childhood and provides an underlying dimension for episodic memory and estimating durations. Because time, unlike distance, lacks a sensory representation, we hypothesized that subjects at different ages attribute different meanings to it when comparing durations; pre-kindergarten children compare the density of events, while adults use the concept of observer-independent absolute time. We asked groups of pre-kindergarteners, school-age children, and adults to compare the durations of an "eventful" and "uneventful" video, both 1-minute long but durations unknown to subjects. In addition, participants were asked to express the durations of both videos non-verbally with simple hand gestures. Statistical analysis has revealed highly polarized temporal biases in each group, where pre-kindergarteners estimated the duration of the eventful video as "longer." In contrast, the school-age group of children and adults claimed the same about the uneventful video. The tendency to represent temporal durations with a horizontal hand gesture was evident among all three groups, with an increasing prevalence with age. These results support the hypothesis that pre-kindergarten-age children use heuristics to estimate time, and they convert from availability to sampling heuristics between pre-kindergarten and school age.

SUBMITTER: Stojic S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9852441 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Children and adults rely on different heuristics for estimation of durations.

Stojić Sandra S Topić Vanja V Nadasdy Zoltan Z

Scientific reports 20230119 1

Time is a uniquely human yet culturally ubiquitous concept acquired over childhood and provides an underlying dimension for episodic memory and estimating durations. Because time, unlike distance, lacks a sensory representation, we hypothesized that subjects at different ages attribute different meanings to it when comparing durations; pre-kindergarten children compare the density of events, while adults use the concept of observer-independent absolute time. We asked groups of pre-kindergartener ...[more]

PMID: 36658160

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Project description:Past research has investigated how children use different sources of information such as social cues and word-learning heuristics to infer referential intents. The present research explored how children weigh and use some of these cues to make referential inferences. Specifically, we examined how switching between languages known (familiar) or unknown (unfamiliar) to a child would influence his or her choice of cue to interpret a novel label in a challenging disambiguation task, where a pointing cue was pitted against the mutual exclusivity (ME) principle. Forty-eight 3-and 4-years-old English-Mandarin bilingual children listened to a story told either in English only (No-Switch), English and Mandarin (Familiar-Switch), English and Japanese (Unfamiliar-Switch), or English and English-sounding nonsense sentences (Nonsense-Switch). They were then asked to select an object (from a pair of familiar and novel objects) after hearing a novel label paired with the speaker's point at the familiar object, e.g., "Can you give me the blicket?" Results showed that children in the Familiar-Switch condition were more willing to relax ME to follow the speaker's point to pick the familiar object than those in the Unfamiliar-Switch condition, who were more likely to pick the novel object. No significant differences were found between the other conditions. Further analyses revealed that children in the Unfamiliar-Switch condition looked at the speaker longer than children in the other conditions when the switch happened. Our findings suggest that children weigh speakers' referential cues and word-learning heuristics differently in different language contexts while taking into account their communicative history with the speaker. There are important implications for general education and other learning efforts, such as designing learning games so that the history of credibility with the user is maintained and how learning may be best scaffolded in a helpful and trusting environment.

Project description:Objectives: To examine compensatory changes of different exercise durations on non-exercise physical activity (NEPA), appetite, and energy intake (EI) in normal and overweight adults, and to determine if different body mass index of individuals interact with these compensatory effects. Methods: Ten normal weight adults (nine females and one male; age: 24.0 ± 0.4 years; BMI: 20.7 ± 0.5 kg/m2) and ten overweight adults (six females and four males; age: 24.5 ± 0.9 years; BMI: 25.9 ± 0.4 kg/m2) participated in this study. The participants completed two exercise trials: short-duration continuous training (SDCT) and long-duration continuous training (LDCT), i.e., a 40 min short-duration and an 80 min long-duration continuous training in a randomized order. Total physical activity and NEPA were monitored using an accelerometer for seven consecutive days, which involved a two-day baseline observation period (C-pre-Ex), three-day exercise intervention period (Ex), and two-day follow-up period (C-post-Ex). Blood samples were collected for appetite-related hormone analysis. Appetite score was assessed using the visual analogue scale. Energy intake was evaluated by weighing the food and recording diaries. Results: The NEPA evaluation showed that it was higher for SDCT than for LDCT in the C-post-Ex period (F (1, 19) = 8.508, p = 0.009) in the total sample. Moreover, results also indicated that NEPA was lower for LDCT (F (2, 18) = 6.316, p = 0.020) and higher for SDCT (F (2, 18) = 3.889, p = 0.026) in the C-post-Ex period than in the C-pre-Ex and Ex periods in overweight group. Acyl-ghrelin revealed a main effect of time in the total sample and in normal weight and overweight groups; it was lower in the C-post-Ex period than in the C-pre-Ex and Ex periods (all p < 0.05). Total EI analysis revealed no significant changes in either the total sample or in the normal weight and overweight groups. Conclusion: These findings demonstrate that short duration exercise led to a compensatory increment in NEPA, whereas long duration exercise induced a compensatory decrease in NEPA. Moreover, there was a higher and delayed compensatory response in overweight adults than in normal weight adults. Nevertheless, energy intake was not changed across time, regardless of exercise duration.

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Children and adults rely on different heuristics for estimation of durations.

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Children and adults rely on different heuristics for estimation of durations.

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