The role of mental rotations in primate-inspired robot navigation

Scripts store the temporal order of component events of everyday activities as well as the temporal position of the events within the activity (early or late). When confronted with an activity, predictions are generated about how the component events will unfold. Thereby, an error-detection mechanism continuously monitors whether they unfold as anticipated or not in order to reveal errors in the unfolding activity. We investigated whether the temporal position “early” or “late” influenced the detection of errors using the pupillary response as an index of cognitive resource consumption. An event triplet consisting of three events was presented in a chronological or non-chronological temporal order. Crucially, the triplet focused either on the beginning (temporal position “early”) or the end (temporal position “late”) of an activity. We assumed that these position codes would be used to facilitate error detection when a non-chronological event was presented. Results showed that errors in the temporal order were detected more successfully in early than in late triplets. Results further suggest that strong predictions are formed about how an activity begins. Violations of this prediction must be overcome by zooming into the representation and allocating attention to the temporal position that consumes cognitive resources. Only after zooming in has taken place successfully may the position codes be used to anticipate temporal violations in unfolding event sequences.     

The effects of a task-irrelevant visual event on spatial working memory

In the present experiment, we investigated whether the memory of a location is affected by the occurrence of an irrelevant visual event. Participants had to memorize the location of a dot. During the retention interval, a task-irrelevant stimulus was presented with abrupt onset somewhere in the visual field. Results showed that the spatial memory representation was affected by the occurrence of the external irrelevant event relative to a control condition in which there was no external event. Specifically, the memorized location was shifted toward the location of the task-irrelevant stimulus. This effect was only present when the onset was close in space to the memory representation. These findings suggest that the “internal” spatial map used for keeping a location in spatial working memory and the “external” spatial map that is affected by exogenous events in the outside world are either the same or tightly linked.     

Constructing autobiographical events within a spatial or temporal context: a comparison of two targeted episodic induction techniques

ABSTRACT

Recalling and imagining autobiographical experiences involves constructing event representations within spatiotemporal contexts. We tested whether generating autobiographical events within a primarily spatial (where the event occurred) or temporal (the sequence of actions that occurred) context affected how the associated mental representation was constructed. We leveraged the well-validated episodic specificity induction (ESI) technique, known to influence the use of episodic processes on subsequent tasks, to develop variants that selectively enhance spatial or temporal processing. We tested the effects of these inductions on the details used to describe past and future autobiographical events. We first replicated the standard ESI effect, showing that ESI enhances generating episodic details, particularly those that are perception-based, when describing autobiographical events (Experiment 1). We then directly compared the effects of the spatial and temporal inductions (Experiment 2 and 3). When describing autobiographical events, spatial induction enhanced generating episodic details, specifically perception-based details, compared to the control or temporal inductions. A greater proportion of the episodic details generated after the temporal induction were gist-based than after the spatial induction, but this proportion did not differ from a control induction. Thus, using a spatial or temporal framework for autobiographical event generation alters the associated details that are accessed.     

Differential Automatic Processing Deficits in Early Stage Alzheimer's Disease

This experiment sought further support for the view that early stage Alzheimer's disease (AD) disrupts cognitive structures that cast experience into a temporal framework. Forty participants, evenly divided between normal elderly (NE) and persons diagnosed with mild AD, viewed 19 lists of 14 pictures each. Following the presentation of each list participants were asked to identify the most recently experienced picture (target) from 3 pictures. A second stimulus was a picture never previously seen; the third picture was a distracting item that had appeared in the list on either one or three occasions. The results show that whereas choice accuracy of the NE group remained largely unimpaired regardless of the delay between the target and the judgment task or the frequency of the distractor, the AD participants exhibited large and profound deficits in temporal judgments, especially when distractor frequency was greater than the more recent event. In effect, the AD group relied on how often an event occurred rather than the time of its occurrence. This finding is consistent with previous research that found AD patients deficient in forming a temporal representation of their experience.     

Culture, temporal focus, and values of the past and the future

This article examines cultural differences in how people value future and past events. Throughout four studies, the authors found that European Canadians attached more monetary value to an event in the future than to an identical event in the past, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians placed more monetary value to a past event than to an identical future event. The authors also showed that temporal focus-thinking about the past or future-explained cultural influences on the temporal value asymmetry effect. Specifically, when induced to think about and focus on the future, Chinese valued the future more than the past, just like Euro-Canadians; when induced to think about and focus on the past, Euro-Canadians valued the past more than the future, just like Chinese.     

The perception of time heals all wounds: temporal distance affects willingness to forgive following an interpersonal transgression

Prior research has assessed the temporal unfolding of forgiveness and found that forgiveness becomes more likely as time distances the victim from the transgression. These findings lend credence to the axiom "time heals all wounds." This research examines the effect of time perception on forgiveness of others by experimentally manipulating temporal distance. In Experiment 1, respondents reported greater willingness to forgive the transgressor when more time had elapsed since the transgression. Experiments 2 and 3 determined the influence of subjective temporal distance on willingness to forgive. Participants who perceived a hypothetical (Experiment 2) or real (Experimental 3) transgression to be farther away in time were more willing to forgive the target than were participants who perceived the event to be temporally closer. Results suggest that temporal appraisals of an event are central to the forgiveness process.     

Keeping track of time: evidence for episodic-like memory in great apes

Episodic memory, as defined by Tulving, can be described in terms of behavioural elements (what, where and when information) but it is also accompained by an awareness of one’s past (chronesthesia) and a subjective conscious experience (autonoetic awareness). Recent experiments have shown that corvids and rodents recall the where, what and when of an event. This capability has been called episodic-like memory because it only fulfils the behavioural criteria for episodic memory. We tested seven chimpanzees, three orangutans and two bonobos of various ages by adapting two paradigms, originally developed by Clayton and colleagues to test scrub jays. In Experiment 1, subjects were fed preferred but perishable food (frozen juice) and less preferred but non-perishable food (grape). After the food items were hidden, subjects could choose one of them either after 5 min or 1 h. The frozen juice was still available after 5 min but melted after 1 h and became unobtainable. Apes chose the frozen juice significantly more after 5 min and the grape after 1 h. In Experiment 2, subjects faced two baiting events happening at different times, yet they formed an integrated memory for the location and time of the baiting event for particular food items. We also included a memory task that required no temporal encoding. Our results showed that apes remember in an integrated fashion what, where and when (i.e., how long ago) an event happened; that is, apes distinguished between different events in which the same food items were hidden in different places at different times. The temporal control of their choices was not dependent on the familiarity of the platforms where the food was hidden. Chimpanzees’ and bonobos’ performance in the temporal encoding task was age-dependent, following an inverted U-shaped distribution. The age had no effect on the performance of the subjects in the task that required no temporal encoding.     

记叙文阅读中时间心理表征的建构：动态观还是静态观

探讨读者在文本阅读中如何通过一系列展开事件的描述建构心理表征。实验一探讨在中间事件持续时间长／短条件下对首尾呼应句阅读时间和对探测词反应时间的影响;结果表明,读者对第一事件信息的获得受中间事件的持续时间长短的影响。实验二探讨当信息储存在长时工作记忆中时能否得出与实验一相一致的结果。结果发现,读者对第一事件信息的获得不受中间事件的持续时间长短的影响。实验三考察当用明确的时间副词来表明持续时间的长短时,连续性的事件是否还存在着时间距离效应。实验结果与实验二的相一致。整个研究结果表明,时间心理表征的建构是动态观还是静态观,主要取决于是否存在时间距离效应。     

Children and situation models of multiple events

The present study demonstrates that children experience difficulties reaching the correct situation model of multiple events described in temporal sentences if the sentences encode language-external events in reverse chronological order. Importantly, the timing of the cue of how to organize these events is crucial: When temporal subordinate conjunctions (before/after) or converb constructions that carry information of how to organize the events were given sentence-medially, children experienced severe difficulties in arriving at the correct interpretation of event order. When this information was provided sentence-initially, children were better able to arrive at the correct situation model, even if it required them to decode the linguistic information reversely with respect to the actual language external events. This indicates that children even aged 8-12 still experience difficulties in arriving at the correct interpretation of the event structure, if the cue of how to order the events is not given immediately when they start building the representation of the situation. This suggests that children's difficulties in comprehending sequential temporal events are caused by their inability to revise the representation of the current event structure at the level of the situation model.     

Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events

Prospective hindsight involves generating an explanation for a future event as if it had already happened; i.e., one goes forward in time, and then looks back. In order to examine how shifts in perspective might influence people's perceptions of events, we investigated two possible factors: temporal perspective (whether an event is set in the future or past) and uncertainty (whether the event's occurrence is certain or uncertain). In the first experiment, temporal perspective showed little influence while outcome uncertainty strongly affected the nature of explanations for events. Explanations for sure events tended to be longer, to contain a higher proportion of episodic reasons, and to be expressed in past tense. Evidence from the second experiment supports the view that uncertainty mediates not the amount of time spent explaining, but rather subjects' choice of explanation type. The implications of these findings for the use of temporal perspective in decision aiding are discussed.     

Long ago it was meant to be: the interplay between time, construal, and fate beliefs

Fate means that an event was meant to be, that is, predetermined by prior unseen forces. Most people believe in fate, which seems at odds with similarly pervasive beliefs that alternative past actions would have brought about different circumstances (i.e., counterfactual beliefs). Two experiments revealed that construal level accounts for the relative plausibility of fate versus counterfactual explanations. Construal was manipulated in Experiment 1, such that goal pursuits framed in abstract ("why?") as opposed to concrete ("how?") terms heightened fate but not counterfactual attributions. Extending this finding, Experiment 2 showed that fate judgments were higher for temporally distant than recent past events, an effect mediated by construal perceptions. Neither counterfactual nor luck judgments varied with temporal distance. These findings help to explain how individuals explain complicated yet meaningful life events while extending the reach of Trope and Liberman's (2003) construal-level theory.     

The impact of experienced versus non‐experienced suggestions on children's recall of repeated events

Three experiments were conducted to test the proposition that children's suggestibility about an occurrence of a repeated event is heightened when an interviewer suggests false details that were experienced in non‐target occurrences of the event as opposed to new details that never occurred. In each experiment, children participated in a repeated event during which specific items varied each time (e.g. the children always got a sticker but the theme of the sticker was different in each occurrence). Separate biasing and memory interviews were then conducted. In Experiment 1, the interviewer merely suggested that the false details might have occurred in the event. In the remaining experiments, the suggested details were clearly linked to the target occurrence with either a contextual or temporal cue. The potential moderating effect of the child's age (Experiment 1) and the retention interval (Experiments 1 and 2) were also examined. Consistent with the initial hypothesis, suggestions about experienced (non‐target) details were more likely to be repeated by the children compared to suggestions about non‐experienced details. In Experiments 2 and 3, experienced suggestions were also more likely to inhibit children's recall of the target occurrence. The relevance and generalizability of these findings to the legal setting are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Luck and Risk

This paper advances new theses about the relationship between luck and risk, using recent work by Duncan Pritchard (2014, 2015, 2016) as its foil. Once Pritchard’s views are introduced in section 1 , the rest of the paper completes two different tasks, one critical and one constructive. By focussing on some epistemological cases that Pritchard’s model would fail to identify, section 2 shows that it relies on a difference that is in fact inessential: the one between the occurrence and the non‐occurrence of an event. Section 3 sketches and defends an alternative account of the luck/risk distinction, based on the consideration of situations (instead of events) from different temporal perspectives: luck assessments track a situation’s past, considering it the actual outcome of some previous event, whereas risk assessments look at the situation’s future, regarding it as the initial condition of some unsettled event.     

When talking makes you feel like a group: The emergence of group-based emotions

Group-based emotions are emotional reactions to group concerns and have been shown to emerge when people appraise events while endorsing a specific social identity. Here we investigate whether discussing a group-relevant event with other group members affects emotional reactions in a similar way. In two experiments, we confronted participants with an unfair group-relevant event, while manipulating their social identity and whether they discussed the event or an unrelated topic. Our major finding is that having group members discuss the unfair group-relevant event led to emotions that were more negative than in the irrelevant discussion and comparable to those observed when social identity had been made salient explicitly beforehand. Moreover, it also generated group-based appraisals of injustice (Experiment 1) and group-based identity (Experiment 2). This research sheds new light not only on the consequences of within-group sharing of emotions for the unfolding of intergroup relations but also on the nature of group-based emotions.     

Neural activity in relation to temporal distance: Differences in past and future temporal discounting

This study investigated the differences between past and future temporal discounting in terms of neural activity in relation to temporal distance. Results show that brain regions are engaged differently in past and future temporal discounting. This is likely because past temporal discounting requires memory reconstruction, whereas future temporal discounting requires the processing of uncertainty about the future. In past temporal discounting, neural activity differed only when preferences were made between rewards received one hour prior and rewards received further in the past. The peak amplitudes of P2 and P3 varied as the temporal distance increased from 2 weeks to 50 years. In future temporal discounting, neural activity differed only when preferences were evaluated between two delayed rewards. The delay conditions (6 months:5 years) and (6 months:50 years) had a significant influence on P2 and N2. Findings indicate the existence of different decision-making systems operating in past and future temporal discounting.     

时间维度在记叙文理解中的作用

采用事件分割范式探讨了中文条件下时间维度在记叙文理解中的作用。实验1在中文条件下重复了Speer和Zacks(2005)年的研究,结果发现读者更多将时间短语所在位置作为分割边界,表明时间转换在情景模型更新中发挥了重要作用。实验2探讨了在没有时间短语条件下读者对文本分割的情况,结果发现读者主要是按照事件单元进行分割;实验3a和3b在文本的事件单元中插入时间短语,形成时间转换与事件转换分离的条件,探讨读者在这种时间转换与事件单元转换不一致的条件下所采用的分割策略,结果表明,读者更多仍然按照事件单元转换进行分割,而且对事件单元转换的依赖强于时间转换,但同时时间短语仍对文本的分割有一定影响。上述结果表明,事件单元作为建构记叙文心理表征的核心单元,时间维度作为事件单元转换的线索,只有在标识事件转换的情况下,才能引发读者情景模型的更新。     

Evidence for a distinction between judged and perceived causality

Two experiments investigated Michotte's launch event, in which successive motion of two objects appears to evoke an immediate perception that the first motion caused the second, as in a collision. Launching was embedded in event sequences where a third event (a colour change of the second object) was established as a competing predictor of the second motion, in an attempt to see whether subjects' learning of alternative predictive relationships would influence their causal impressions of launch events. In Experiment 1 subjects saw launch events in which temporal contiguity at the point of impact was varied so that an impact was varied so that an impact itself did not reliably predict when the second object would move. Half of these scenes, however, contained a colour change of the second object which did reliably predict when it would move. In accordance with Michotte's theory, subjects' ratings of the degree of perceived causality were not affected by the colour change. In Experiment 2 subjects saw scenes that contained launch events with or without temporal contiguity and a colour change. These were interspersed with events in which a colour change alone did or did not precede the second motion. Thus, movement of the second object was either contingent on or independent of the impact. Subjects repeatedly (a) rated perceived causality in single launch events and (b) judged the necessity of collisions for movement in the overall set of events. These responses dissociated, in that ratings type (a) showed only a substantial contiguity effect, whereas judgements of type (b) showed both a contingency and a much smaller contiguity effect. These results appear to support a distinction between judged and perceived causality and are discussed with respect to Michotte's theory of direct causal perception.