Acceso usuarios
Jacques Montangero, Francisco Pons
The diachronic tendency is the disposition to evoke past or future stages of a current situation. Two experiments examined the frequency, nature and development of this tendency. Each experiment involved 60 subjects who were successively shown three pictures (one picture being common to the two experiments) that they were requested to describe. Subjects were assigned to one of five age groups from 8 to 12 years of age in experiment 1 and to one of four groups from 9 to 24 years in experiment 2. Results show that the frequency of diachronic responses (evocation of an event not present in the picture) slowly increased with age until a ceiling effect could be observed. For children, the content of the picture influenced the frequency of diachronic responses. A qualitative analysis of the answers revealed that non-present events were mentioned in order to explain unusual and unstable aspects of a situation. Children referred to the actions that produced these aspects, whereas from the age of 15 subjects spontaneously mentioned the physical causes or the intentions at the origin of the situation.
Key words: time, time perspective, cognitive development, verbal description of images.
