Existing studies examining the development of temporal order memory show that although young children perform above chance on some tasks assessing temporal order memory, there are significant age-related differences across childhood. Yet, the trajectory of children’s ability to retrieve temporal order remains unclear as existing conclusions are drawn from cross-sectional studies. The present study utilized an accelerated longitudinal design in order to characterize the developmental trajectory of temporal order memory in a sample of 200 healthy 4- to 8-year-old children. Specifically, two tasks commonly used in the literature were tested longitudinally: a primacy judgment task and an ordering task. Results revealed that, even after controlling for differences in IQ, linearly increasing trajectories characterized age-related change in performance for both tasks; however, change appeared greater for the temporal ordering task. Further, performance on the two tasks was positively related, suggesting shared underlying mechanisms. These findings provide a more thorough understanding of temporal order memory in early to middle childhood by characterizing the developmental trajectories of two commonly used tasks and have important implications for our understanding of children’s developing memory more broadly.

现有的研究时间顺序记忆发展的研究表明，尽管幼儿在评估时间顺序记忆的某些任务上表现出色，但整个童年时期存在显着的与年龄相关的差异。然而，由于现有结论是从横断面研究中得出的，儿童恢复时间顺序的能力轨迹仍不清楚。本研究采用加速纵向设计来描述 200 名 4 至 8 岁健康儿童样本中时间顺序记忆的发展轨迹。具体来说，纵向测试了文献中常用的两个任务：首要判断任务和排序任务。结果显示，即使在控制了智商差异之后，线性增加的轨迹也表征了这两项任务的表现与年龄相关的变化。然而，时间排序任务的变化似乎更大。此外，这两项任务的表现呈正相关，表明具有共同的潜在机制。这些发现通过描述两种常用任务的发展轨迹，为幼儿至中期的时间顺序记忆提供了更全面的理解，并对我们更广泛地理解儿童发展记忆具有重要意义。