Le développement des capacités de jugement des durées chez l'enfant

For several decades, since the work of Piaget, it has been believed that correct judgements of durations require sophisticated reasoning abilities that emerge at about 8 years of age. However, some researchers have demonstrated accurate temporal knowledge in young children and have explained their poor judgements on classical piagetian tasks not by their inability to correctly judge time, but by age-related attentional difficulties. Recently, researchers have thus reassessed the temporal behaviour in children with the experimental paradigms used in animals and humans adults in the framework of the temporal information processing models that assume the existence of an internal clock. Findings suggest that this type of clock is functional at an early age. Other findings allow us to better understand the role of the development of attention, memory and metacognitive processes in the development of the abilities to judge time. The aim of this article is to synthesize these recent findings.