Assessing Temporal Relational Responding in Young Children

Relational frame theory (RFT) sees temporal relational responding (e.g., A is after B; B is before A) as a key operant skill involved in the understanding of time. From this perspective relating events temporally is important for everyday life situations such as sequencing events, planning, and talking about the past or future. The aim of the present research was to assess performance on a test of temporal relational responding in young children at increasing levels of complexity. Twenty-five typically developing children between 3 and 8 years were assessed on tasks of nonarbitrary (i.e., based on physical events) and arbitrary (i.e., based on contextual cues only) temporal relations. Results showed a correlation between overall performance across temporal relational responding tasks and age. Performance on nonarbitrary “before” and “after” trials improved similarly with age whereas with arbitrary relations, participants performed much more poorly on “after” trials than on “before” trials and some interesting cohort specific patterns were also seen. Implications of the results and future research directions are discussed.