We outline a dual systems approach to temporal cognition, which distinguishes between two cognitive systems for dealing with how things unfold over time – a temporal updating system and a temporal reasoning system – of which the former is both phylogenetically and ontogenetically more primitive than the latter, and which are at work alongside each other in adult human cognition. We describe the main features of each of the two systems, the types of behavior the more primitive temporal updating system can support, and the respects in which it is more limited than the temporal reasoning system. We then use the distinction between the two systems to interpret findings in comparative and developmental psychology, arguing that animals operate only with a temporal updating system and that children start out doing so too, before gradually becoming capable of thinking and reasoning about time. After this, we turn to adult human cognition and suggest that our account can also shed light on a specific feature of humans’ everyday thinking about time that has been the subject of debate in the philosophy of time, which consists in a tendency to think about the nature of time itself in a way that appears ultimately self-contradictory. We conclude by considering the topic of intertemporal choice, and argue that drawing the distinction between temporal updating and temporal reasoning is also useful in the context of characterizing two distinct mechanisms for delaying gratification.

An account of the development of temporal understanding is proposed which links such understanding with the development of episodic memory. We distinguish between different ways of representing time in terms of the kinds of temporal frameworks they involve. Distinctions are made between frameworks that are perspectival or nonperspectival and those that represent recurrent sequences or particular times. Even primitive temporal understanding integrates both perspectival and nonperspectival components. However, since early frameworks are event-based and localized, they are not yet sufficient for episodic memory in that they do not enable the child to think of events as having occurred at particular points in time. We describe the emergence of new kinds of frameworks in terms of the development of temporal decentering. Two levels of temporal decentering are distinguished, with the higher level involving an appreciation of how event representations depend on one's temporal perspective.

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Four experiments examined children's ability to reason about the causal significance of the order in which 2 events occurred (the pressing of buttons on a mechanically operated box). In Study 1, 4-year-olds were unable to make the relevant inferences, whereas 5-year-olds were successful on one version of the task. In Study 2, 3-year-olds were successful on a simplified version of the task in which they were able to observe the events although not their consequences. Study 3 found that older children had difficulties with the original task even when provided with cues to attend to order information. However, 5-year-olds performed successfully in Study 4, in which the causally relevant event was made more salient.Much of the recent research on the development of causal reasoning has emphasized young children's competence with various aspects of causal reasoning (e.g., Corrigan & Denton, 1996;Gopnik, Sobel, Schulz, & Glymour, 2001;Schlottmann, Allen, Linderoth, & Hesketh, 2002). It has been well established that even in infancy children show some type of sensitivity to the causal relationships between events (Leslie, 1982;Oakes, 1994;Oakes & Cohen, 1990) and that children in the preschool years show an appreciation of the causal powers of familiar objects (Bullock, Gelman, & Baillargeon, 1982;Gelman, Bullock, & Meck, 1980) and seem to infer the causal powers of novel objects in principled ways (Shultz, 1982;Shultz & Kestenbaum, 1985). Indeed, the idea that relatively sophisticated causal reasoning abilities are intact early in development has played an important role in the influential "theory-theory" approach to conceptual development.This emphasis on the competence of preschoolers' causal reasoning can be contrasted with a claim by Povinelli, Landry, Theall, Clark, and Castille (1999) that 3-year-olds have difficulty with a fundamental causal ability, a causal ability that Povinelli et al. have linked closely with the development of a concept of time. Specifically, they have argued that children of this age may not grasp that events that occurred in the more recent past may be more relevant to determining the current state of the world than events that took place at an earlier point in time. To use a common example, imagine that you have lost your car keys and are trying to find them. You may mentally retrace the day's events in an attempt to remember what you were doing when you last had the car keys, because you know that this most recent event is the most causally relevant to the current location of the keys. Povinelli et al.'s claim is that 3-year-olds do not have this kind of understanding of the causal relevance of the relative recency of events.They examined this ability in 3-and 5-year-olds (Povinelli et al., 1999, Study 5) using a delayed video feedback technique. Along with an experimenter, children took part in two different games, one after another, in a room in which there were two different colored boxes attached to the wall behind the location where the child was seated. During Game 1, and unbeknow...

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Abstract:I examine some recent claims put forward by L. A. Paul, Barry Dainton and Simon Prosser, to the effect that perceptual experiences of movement and change involve an (apparent) experience of 'passage', in the sense at issue in debates about the metaphysics of time. Paul, Dainton and Prosser all argue that this supposed feature of perceptual experience -call it a phenomenology of passage -is illusory, thereby defending the view that there is no such a thing as passage, conceived of as a feature of mind-independent reality. I suggest that in fact there is no such phenomenology of passage in the first place. There is, however, a specific structural aspect of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of movement and change that can explain how one might mistakenly come to the belief that such experiences do involve a phenomenology of passage.

In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or prereflective "sense of agency." However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, has been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people's causal beliefs can be affected by the Correspondence should be sent to Christoph Hoerl, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding.

A new model of the development of temporal concepts is described that assumes that there are substantial changes in how children think about time in the early years. It is argued that there is a shift from understanding time in an event-dependent way to an event-independent understanding of time. Early in development, very young children are unable to think about locations in time independently of the events that occur at those locations. It is only with development that children begin to have a proper grasp of the distinction between past, present, and future, and represent time as linear and unidirectional. The model assumes that although children aged two to three years may categorize events differently depending on whether they lie in the past or the future, they may not be able to understand that whether an event is in the future or in the past is something that changes as time passes and varies with temporal perspective. Around four to five years, children understand how causality operates in time, and can grasp the systematic relations that obtain between different locations in time, which provides the basis for acquiring the conventional clock and calendar system.