Cognitive Models Of Psychological Time

This volume critically reviews cognitive models of psychological time in order to clarify and enrich what is known about the temporal aspects of cognitive processes. Concentrating on how adult humans experience, remember, and construct time, chapters survey recent work on such topics as mental representations of time, timing in movement sequences, time and timing in music, and the processing of temporal information. Also included are chapters with a broader perspective, such as the impacts of methodological choices, chronobiology and temporal experience, a comparative approach to time and order, and normal and abnormal temporal perspectives. The book makes current research and theories on the psychology of time more accessible to researchers in cognitive psychology.

How do people perceive time? This book presents a wealth of contemporary and classical research, including some of the history and philosophy of time perception. Influential internal clock-based models of time perception receive an in-depth but non-technical introduction and discussion. The role of cognition and emotion in perceiving time is also explored, as well as questions derived from time experience in daily life, such as why time seems to pass more quickly in one situation rather than another. Classical and modern research on timing in children is reviewed, as well as work on time perception and time experience in older people. Leading recent models of animal timing are also discussed in a non-mathematical way.

This volume is the outcome of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Time, Action and Cognition. which was held in Saint-Malo, France, in October 1991. The theme - time in action and cognition of time - was sparked by growing awareness in informal meetings between mostly French-speaking time psychologists of the need to bring together time specialists in the areas of development, motor behavior, attention, memory and representations. The workshop was designed to be a forum where different theoretical points of view and a variety of empirical approaches could be presented and discussed. Time psychologists tended to draw conclusions restricted to their specific fields of interest. From our own experience, we felt that addressing a common issue - possible relationships between time in action and representations of time - could lead to a more comprehensive approach. We are endebted to NATO for allowing us to bring this idea to fruition. We take this opportunity as well to express our thanks to Cognisciences ( Cognisud section) -- an active interdisciplinary research organization - for its financial backing and the CNRS for its scientific support.

Each chapter in this book is written by, and devoted to the original work of a leading researcher in his or her own field. The book presents an integrative approach to the psychological study of time in an attempt to bring to light similarities between bodies of research which have been developed independently within different theoretical frameworks - from Piaget's structuralist-organismic model, to information processing approaches. The chapters are organized in a life-span perspective, with different chapters focusing on different age-levels. It includes analyses of time perception in infancy, temporal systems in the developing language, time conception, time measurement and time reading in middle childhood and adolescence, as well as various models of time perception in the adult, both normal and abnormal. A rich concept such as time sheds light on a wide variety of major topics in psychology; the book will be of value to cognitive, developmental and educational psychologists, as well as to psycholinguists.

Developments in the field of timing and time perception have multiplied the number of relevant questions regarding psychological time, and helped to provide answers and open many avenues of thought. This book brings together presentations of many of the main ideas, findings, hypotheses and theories that experimental psychology offers to the field.

This book bridges the gap between models of human behavior that are based on cognitive task analysis and those based on neural networks. The author argues that these approaches are incomplete and not properly related to each other. His synthesis reconciles the very different conceptualizations of human memory assumed by these two approaches by assuming that 'what the brain remembers' is not a collection of symbols or neurons or even networks of either of these, but rather how to coordinate behavior in time, relating different modalities of conception and movement. A second premise is that behavior sequences are categorized, with perceptual categorizations (sounds, images) comprising the first order of categorization and conceptual categorizations of perceptions and actions in time comprising the second order. The conceptual categorizations are themselves sequenced and categorized, corresponding to the familiar classification hierarchies in cognitive models. Inspired by Bartlett's work, the author seeks to develop a theory of "process memory"--memory for experience in time. Following the methodology of situated cognition, he finds clues in the particulars of human activity, such as typing errors, how a computer interface is used, how a child learns to play in a swimming pool, odd limitations in language comprehension, and so on. Throughout, he examines existing (and often famous) cognitive and neural models with respect to these phenomena. In each case, he attempts to show that the experienced behavior can be understood as sequences of categories being reactivated, substituted, and composed. Ultimately, this analysis is shown to be the link that may lead to improvement of both symbolic and neurally based models of memory and behavior, with concomitant implications for cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science as a whole.

This book is an edited collection of papers from international experts in philosophy and psychology concerned with time. The collection aims to bridge the gap between these disciplines by focussing on five key themes and providing philosophical and psychological perspectives on each theme. The first theme is the concept of time. The discussion ranges from the folk concept of time to the notion of time in logic, philosophy and psychology. The second theme concerns the notion of present in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and psychology. The third theme relates to continuity and flow of time in mind. One of the key questions in this section is how the apparent temporal continuity of conscious experience relates to the possibly discrete character of underlying neural processes. The fourth theme is the timing of experiences, with a focus on the perception of simultaneity and illusions of temporal order. Such effects are treated as test cases for hypotheses about the relationship between the subjective temporal order of experience and the objective order of neural events. The fifth and the final theme of the volume is time and intersubjectivity. This section examines the role of time in interpersonal coordination and in the development of social skills. The collection will appeal to both psychologists and philosophers, but also to researchers from other disciplines who seek an accessible overview of the research on time in psychology and philosophy.

The crux of the debate between proponents of behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology focuses on the issue of accessibility. Cognitivists believe that mental mechanisms and processes are accessible, and that their inner workings can be inferred from experimental observations of behavior. Behaviorists, on the contrary, believe that mental processes and mechanisms are inaccessible, and that nothing important about them can be inferred from even the most cleverly designed empirical studies. One argument that is repeatedly raised by cognitivists is that even though mental processes are not directly accessible, this should not be a barrier to unravelling the nature of the inner mental processes and mechanisms. Inference works for other sciences, such as physics, so why not psychology? If physics can work so successfully with their kind of inaccessibility to make enormous theoretical progress, then why not psychology? As with most previous psychological debates, there is no "killer argument" that can provide an unambiguous resolution. In its absence, author William Uttal explores the differing properties of physical and psychological time, space, and mathematics before coming to the conclusion that there are major discrepancies between the properties of the respective subject matters that make the analogy of comparable inaccessibilities a false one. This title was first published in 2008.