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.     

Predicting a changing taste: Do people know what they will like?

A distinction is made between decision utility, experienced utility, and predicted utility and an experiment is reported addressing people's ability to forecast experienced utility. Subjects in two experiments made predictions of their future liking for stimuli to which they were then exposed daily for one week. The stimuli were ice cream in a pilot study, plain yogurt in the main study, and short musical pieces in both studies. Decreased liking was the modal prediction, even when the true outcome was increased liking, or reduced dislike. There was substantial stability of tastes, but there were also substantial individual differences in the size and even the sign of changes in liking with repeated exposure. There was little or no correlation between the predictions of hedonic change that individuals made and the changes they actually experienced.     

The temporal–hippocampal region and retention: The role of temporo-entorhinal connections in rats

Results from previous studies suggest that the entorhinal cortex may be involved in mnemonic processes. The present study was carried out to investigate whether disruption of fibre connections between the temporal cortex and lateral entorhinal area may impair retention of a pre-operatively acquired simultaneous brightness discrimination task. The lesion resulted in a severe impairment in retaining the discrimination task (Experiment 1). The retention deficit could not be traced into the hippocampal formation by making perforant path lesions or hippocampal lesions (Experiment 2). The results indicate that the lateral entorhinal cortex is more crucial for reference memory than the hippocampal formation.     

The hope of the future: The experience of pregnancy influences women’s implicit space–time mappings

It has long been observed that speakers employ spatial concepts “front” and “back” to talk about temporal concepts “past” and “future.” However, the direction of space-time mappings varies across cultures. According to Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH), people’s implicit associations between space and time are conditioned by their temporal focus. Here we tested whether pregnancy can affect Chinese women’s temporal focus and thereby influence their space-time mappings. One of the most striking characteristics of pregnant women noted by previous research is their future-oriented thought. Based on this, we predicted that pregnant women should be more future-focused. Consistent with this prediction, the results demonstrated that pregnant women tended to be more future-focused than non-pregnant women and demonstrated a greater tendency to conceptualize the future as in front of them, supporting the TFH. The current research offers a new perspective that culture-external factors such as pregnancy can also influence people’s spatialization of time.     

Liberating narratives and the play of unforbidden pleasures: In brief dynamic therapy

Drawing upon the work of Adam Phillips and Ronald Britton the author highlights the intimidating and fear-inducing nature of the super-ego and the role of the therapist in supporting the judgements of the ego and liberating it from the domination of the super-ego. He goes on to explore the proposition that moral principles do not need to be oppressive in nature and that they can emanate from objects that are more akin to sexual or aesthetic objects. These themes are linked to Woodmansey’s conceptualistion of the punitive and humiliating super-ego, and the origin of the super-ego as an internalisation of an external conflict is outlined. The role of identifying a Cyclical Maladaptive Pattern as a focus and its contribution in identifying the super-ego and how it manifests in the client’s narrative are explored, as well as the crucial contribution of a playful stance on the part of therapist in subverting and undermining the intimidating strictures of the super-ego.     

Dreaming and cognition in patients with frontotemporal dysfunction

Individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) have hallucinations and mild cognitive dysfunction. The objective of this work was to study dreams in PD and TLE patients using a common functional model of dream production involving the limbic and paralimbic structures.Dreams were characterised in early-stage PD (19 males) and TLE patients (52) with dream diaries classified by the Hall van de Castle system and were compared with matched controls.In PD, there were significant differences between patients’ dreams and those of controls: animals, physical aggression, and a befriender were more common in patients, and aggressor and bodily misfortunes were less common. The dreams of patients with frontal dysfunction showed more aggressive features.TLE patients had lower recall than PD patients and a higher proportion of dreams involving family and familiar settings, lower proportions involving success, and a higher incidence of frontal dysfunction.The dreams of PD and TLE patients share important features.     

Time engineering in the schizophrenias

Temporal conceptualisation and investigation of brain-mind functioning, in health and in neuro-psychiatric disease, is a relatively new field in neuroscience. The cerebellum has long been suspected as the centre for the organization of timing in the brain. This article examines endophenotypes for temporal coding in schizophrenia, centring on aberrant, neuronal, input connectivity to the cerebellum.     

“If only I had” versus “If only I had not”: Mental deletions,mental additions,and perceptions of meaning in life events

ABSTRACT

The present research investigated the relationship between meaning perceptions and the structure of counterfactual thoughts. In Study 1, participants reflected on how turning points in their lives could have turned out otherwise. Those who were instructed to engage in subtractive (e.g. If only I had not done X…”) counterfactual thinking (SCT) about those turning points subsequently reported higher meaning perceptions than did those who engaged in additive (e.g. ‘If only I had done X…’) counterfactual thinking (ACT). In Study 2, participants who reflected upon life events from the perspective of understanding the past (versus preparing for the future) tended to engage in more SCT than ACT. Finally, in Study 3, participants engaged in more SCT than ACT about life events whose meaning was perceived as certain (as opposed to uncertain) – presumably to maintain their pre-existing sense of meaning. Implications for the study of counterfactual thinking and meaning are discussed.     

The detection of temporally defined objects does not require focused attention

Perceptual grouping is crucial to distinguish objects from their background. Recent studies have shown that observers can detect an object that does not have any unique qualities other than unique temporal properties. A crucial question is whether focused attention is needed for this type of grouping. In two visual search experiments, we show that searching for an object defined by temporal grouping can occur in parallel. These findings suggest that focused attention is not needed for temporal grouping to occur. It is proposed that temporal grouping may occur because the neurons representing the changing object elements adopt firing frequencies that cause the visual system to bind these elements together without the need for focused attention.     

Modality effects in memory for basic stimulus attributes: A temporal and nontemporal comparison

Previous research suggests that there are significant differences in the operation of reference memory for stimuli of different modalities, with visual temporal entries appearing to be more durable than auditory entries (Ogden, Wearden, & Jones, 2008 Ogden, R. S., Wearden, J. H. and Jones, L. A. 2008. The remembrance of times past: Interference in temporal reference memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34: 1524–1544. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2010). Ogden et al. (2008 Ogden, R. S., Wearden, J. H. and Jones, L. A. 2008. The remembrance of times past: Interference in temporal reference memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34: 1524–1544. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2010 Ogden, R. S., Wearden, J. H. and Jones, L. A. 2010. Are memories for duration modality specific?. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63: 65–80. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) demonstrated that when participants were required to store multiple auditory temporal standards over a period of delay there was significant systematic interference to the representation of the standard characterized by shifts in the location of peak responding. No such performance deterioration was observed when multiple visually presented durations were encoded and maintained. The current article explored whether this apparent modality-based difference in reference memory operation is unique to temporal stimuli or whether similar characteristics are also apparent when nontemporal stimuli are encoded and maintained. The modified temporal generalization method developed in Ogden et al. (2008) Ogden, R. S., Wearden, J. H. and Jones, L. A. 2008. The remembrance of times past: Interference in temporal reference memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34: 1524–1544. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] was employed; however, standards and comparisons varied by pitch (auditory) and physical line length (visual) rather than duration. Pitch and line length generalization results indicated that increasing memory load led to more variable responding and reduced recognition of the standard; however, there was no systematic shift in the location of peak responding. Comparison of the results of this study with those of Ogden et al. (2008 Ogden, R. S., Wearden, J. H. and Jones, L. A. 2008. The remembrance of times past: Interference in temporal reference memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34: 1524–1544. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2010 Ogden, R. S., Wearden, J. H. and Jones, L. A. 2010. Are memories for duration modality specific?. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63: 65–80. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggests that although performance deterioration as a consequence of increases in memory load is common to auditory temporal and nontemporal stimuli and visual nontemporal stimuli, systematic interference is unique to auditory temporal processing.