Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans regularly use age to make predictions about other people. However, little is known about how children come to understand age. Children are sensitive to physical correlates of age already in infancy, but whether this indicates an early-emerging understanding of age as time spent alive remains an open question. We investigated the nature of children's early knowledge about age in the present study. We asked children to identify members of different age groups (e.g., "babies", "grown ups", etc.) and to order them chronologically. We found that 3- to 4-year-old children performed better on the identification task than the chronological ordering task. This suggests that children may form age group categories and map them onto labels early in development without yet understanding the chronological process of aging. These categories may initially function as placeholder structures, which children later reorganize into a chronological concept of age.