Flow and structure of time experience – concept, empirical validation and implications for psychopathology

Interrupted Time Experience in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Empirical Evidence from Content Analysis

“…The TQ is based on a conceptual distinction within the conscious experience of time between the flow or passage of time and the structure of time (past, present, future). This distinction is by no means trivial, as it has previously been speculated that differentiating between the flow of time, and the structure of time, may be useful in order to differentiate psychopathological conditions (Kupke, 2007;Kupke & Vogeley, 2009;Fuchs, 2013;Fuchs & van Duppen, 2017;Stanghellini et al, 2017;Vogel et al, 2018a). Questions (Q) 1-3 address the experience of the passage of time.…”

“…No time limits were given in order to guarantee data adequacy through proper data saturation (Sandelowski, M., 1995;Pope, C. et al 2000;Mason, M., 2010;Glaser B., & Strauss A., 2017). The TQ has been successfully used in two recent studies (Vogel et al, 2018a;Vogel et al, 2018b) and been demonstrated to sufficiently address both passage and structure of time with differential diagnostic resolution.…”

“…We administered a multiple choice vocabulary test for verbal intelligence (WST) (Schmidt & Metzler, 1992) to all participants in order to guarantee sufficient language proficiency and rule out potentially interfering speech development disorders. Participants were matched to the healthy population reported in Vogel et al (2018a) according to verbal IQ in order to rule out any confounding influence from group differences in verbal communication. Demographics and results from AQ, BDI-II and WST are presented in Table 1. -Tbl.…”

“…We present qualitative data on the experience of time obtained from participants with ASD. We compare our findings with those from a previous study employing the same methodological approach on healthy participants (Vogel et al, 2018a), in order to potentially identify and discuss distinct differences between individuals without ASD and without history of mental disease. This explorative approach holds the potential to not only provide additional understanding of the experience of adults with ASD, but also to generate novel hypotheses for further quantitative and experimental research.…”

“…It has recently been suggested, that temporal flow and hence time experience may be constituted by the continuous processes composing Bayesian perceptual inference (Hohwy et al 2016; also see Vogel et al, 2018a). Bayesian inference states that top-down inferences regarding our environment, called priors, are constantly updated by the neural system depending on bottomup perceptual information (e.g.…”