Temporal cognition: Connecting subjective time to perception, attention, and memory.

Abstract

Time is a universal psychological dimension, but time perception has often been studied and discussed in relative isolation. Increasingly, researchers are searching for unifying principles and integrated models that link time perception to other domains. In this review, we survey the links between temporal cognition and other psychological processes. Specifically, we describe how subjective duration is affected by nontemporal stimulus properties (perception), the allocation of processing resources (attention), and past experience with the stimulus (memory). We show that many of these connections instantiate a "processing principle," according to which perceived time is positively related to perceptual vividity and the ease of extracting information from the stimulus. This empirical generalization generates testable predictions and provides a starting-point for integrated theoretical frameworks. By outlining some of the links between temporal cognition and other domains, and by providing a unifying principle for understanding these effects, we hope to encourage time-perception researchers to situate their work within broader theoretical frameworks, and that researchers from other fields will be inspired to apply their insights, techniques, and theorizing to improve our understanding of the representation and judgment of time. (PsycINFO Database Record

Duration compression induced by visual and phonological repetition of Chinese characters

“…We compared three levels of repetition: the visual (e.g., 木-), phonological (e.g., 目/mu/-/mu/), and semantic (e.g., 足/zu/ -脚/ jiao/) repetitions. Our findings on the visual repetition replicated the repetition compression effect found in the literature (Birngruber et al, 2015b;Cai et al, 2015;Matthews, 2011;Matthews & Gheorghiu, 2016;Matthews & Meck, 2016). We further showed that the repetition compression was location independent (Experiment 1b).…”

“…However, a recent study by Matthews (2015) reported that the repetition compression of subjective duration is reduced and even reversed when repetition trials become more frequent. The finding suggests there is an interaction between the repetition suppression and the attentional improvement of relevant informative processing modulated by the same high-level expectation (Matthews & Meck, 2016). Studies also showed the temporal repetition compression can be spatial specific (Burr, Tozzi, & Morrone, 2007;Cai et al, 2015), consistent with the notion of the low-level adaptive processing (Johnston et al, 2006).…”

“…Our subjective time is susceptible to many factors, such as nontemporal properties, attention, emotion, action and intention, and prior experience (Allman, Teki, Griffiths, & Meck, 2014;Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009;Ganzenmüller, Shi, & Müller, 2012;Jia, Shi, & Feng, 2015;Matthews & Meck, 2016;Shi & Burr, 2016;Shi, Church, & Meck, 2013;Shi, Ganzenmüller, & Müller, 2013;Xuan, Zhang, He, & Chen, 2007). The latter, prior experience, causes various types of time distortions, such as spatialspecific duration compression (Johnston, Arnold, & Nishida, 2006), central tendency of duration judgment (Gu, Jurkowski, Shi, & Meck, 2016;Jazayeri & Shadlen, 2010;, odd-ball time dilation (Pariyadath & Eagleman, 2007;Tse, Intriligator, Rivest, & Cavanagh, 2004), and repetition compression (Birngruber, Schröter, & Ulrich, 2015b;Matthews, 2011;Matthews & Gheorghiu, 2016).…”

“…Earlier research, however, primarily focused on the repetition effect induced by repeating simple visual or auditory items (Birngruber et al, 2015b;Kim & McAuley, 2013;Matthews & Gheorghiu, 2016;Matthews & Meck, 2016). Complex stimuli, such as Chinese characters, not only appear as visual patterns of strokes but also invoke high-level phonological and semantic cognitive processing.…”

The Development of Temporal Concepts: Learning to Locate Events in Time

“…It has therefore been argued that there must be more basic aspects of the mature notion of time that this approach neglects (Levin, 1982(Levin, , 1992Weist, 1989;Wilkening, 1982). Moreover, the idea that we can measure children's notion of time primarily by looking at the accuracy of their duration judgments, as is assumed in the Piagetian approach, also faces the problem that even the duration judgments of adults can be affected by irrelevant stimulus dimensions (see Matthews & Meck, 2016, for a recent review), whilst, at the same time, even relatively young children can make some judgments of duration, arguably without relying on the sort of complex inferential processes highlighted within the Piagetian tradition (Droit-Volet, 2002, 2013Droit-Volet & Coull, 2016). Weist (1989) has spoken of a Piagetian void' that this approach leaves, even setting aside other problems it faces, because it has little to say about early childhood.…”