Why children perceive time slower than adults

Children's perception of time is relatively understudied. Learning to see time through their eyes may be fundamental to a happier human experience.

My household is absorbed in debate over when time goes the fastest or slowest.

"Slowest in the car!" yells my son.

"Never!" replies my daughter. "I'm too busy for time to go slow, but maybe on weekends when we are on the sofa watching movies."

There's some consensus too; they both agree that the days after Christmas and their birthdays dawdle by gloomily as it dawns on them they have to wait another 365 days to celebrate once more. Years seem to drag on endlessly at their age.

It's a feeling I remember well; the summer holidays filled with water play, skipping on the freshly cut lawn, the laundry drying on the washing line whilst the Sun blazed. At moments like that, time really did feel like it moved slowly.

Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology who studies cognitive development at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, believes children and time is a hugely understudied topic. Her work has long probed whether there is something fundamentally different about time processes in children, such as an internal clock that functions at a different speed to that of adults. But there are still more questions than answers.

McCormack adds that our understanding of passages of time are also based on when people are asked to make those time judgements. "Are you asking the question while events are happening or retrospectively?" She gives an example that many will relate to. "The time from when my child was born to when they left home now seems as if it went in the blink of an eye. But during the time when you're actually engaged in the business of child rearing, a single day lasts an eternity."

Much research focuses on how our experience of the passage of time depends on how our brain stores memories and captures experiences. This is something that has long fascinated Zoltán Nádasdy, associate professor of psychology at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

As an undergraduate student at the University of Budapest in 1987, Nádasdy convinced his fellow students to undertake a field study on time perception amongst children and adults. He wanted to understand why time appears to dilate when there's an accident, for example. The experiment was simple. They showed groups of children and adults two videos, both one minute long and asked them which video felt the longest and which felt the shortest.

They used hand gestures to understand if participants perceived time as a horizontal flow, something that was evident in all three age groups.

What the experiment shows, says Nádasdy, is that in the absence of a sensory organ to predict time, humans use other approximations.

"Our explicit sensory experience of the time is always indirect, which means that we need to reach for something that we think correlates with time," he says. "And in psychology this is called heuristics. So, for kids what can they reach out to? How much they can talk about it."

That proxy tends to change once children go to school, a place where they begin to learn about the concepts of simultaneity and absolute time. "It doesn't give us the sensation of time, but it just replaces those heuristics with another one. When you go to school you are on a schedule. Your day is totally controlled."

"The biggest source of input to our brain is through vision, from the retina to the brain," says Bejan. "Through the optical nerve the brain receives snapshots, like the frames of a movie. The brain develops in infancy and is used to receiving lots of these screenshots. In adulthood the body is much bigger. The travel distance between the retina and the brain has doubled in size, the pathways of transmission have become more complex with more branches. And in addition with age, we experience degradation."

This, he says, means the rate at which we receive "mental images" from the stimuli of our sensory organs decreases with age. This creates the sensation of compressed time in our minds as we are receiving few mental images in one unit of clock time as adults compared with when we are children.

Take a fun-filled two-week summer camp – it may be more memorable than your entire school year. Nádasdy explains that it is highly likely that those summer camp memories would occupy a much larger piece of brain tissue, because of the sheer number of adventures that took place during that short period.

"It's possible that people's judgments about what actually happened during a particular time period in part reflects their memory for the amount of novel things that they remember happening," says McCormack. "For example, if you're an older adult, there might not have been very many big life changes that have happened for you over the last 10 years." But when there are, those will stick in your memory just as much as that summer camp.

Bejan has some other less exertive ideas too.

"Slow it down a little more, force yourself to do new things to get away from the routine," he says. "Treat yourself to surprises. Do unusual things. Have you heard a good joke? Tell me! Do you have a new idea? Do something. Make something. Say something."