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.     

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.     

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.     

Temporal preparation decreases perceptual latency: Evidence from a clock paradigm

A clock paradigm was employed to assess whether temporal preparation decreases the time to detect the onset of a stimulus—that is, perceptual latency. In four experiments participants watched a revolving clock hand while listening to soft or loud target tones under high or low temporal preparation. At the end of each trial, participants reported the clock hand position at the onset of the target tone. The deviation of the reported clock hand position from the actual position indexed perceptual latency. As expected, perceptual latency decreased with target tone intensity. Most importantly, however, greater temporal preparation decreased perceptual latency in all four experiments, especially for soft tones, which supports rather directly the idea that temporal preparation diminishes the duration of perceptual processing.     

The effects of acute exercise on temporal generalization

Sixteen healthy college students performed a multiple-trial referenced temporal generalization task and an episodic temporal generalization task before and during moderate-intensity aerobic exercise. The same tasks were performed in a resting control condition. Working memory tasks were also administered before, during, and after exercise to determine whether exercise affected working memory processes. Temporal generalization gradients demonstrated leftward shifts during exercise when compared to rest, indicating that the subject perceived intervals to elapse more slowly. This finding is consistent with an increased pacemaker speed. Subjective lengthening of stimuli as the task progressed did not occur during exercise or rest. No significant differences were observed on the episodic timing task, nor were any differences found on the working memory tasks. These findings provide support for the notion that exercise influences the internal clock in a manner similar to other arousal-inducing manipulations.     

The effect of scene structure on time perception

The current experiments examined the hypothesis that scene structure affects time perception. In three experiments, participants judged the duration of realistic scenes that were presented in a normal or jumbled (i.e., incoherent) format. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the subjective duration of normal scenes was greater than subjective duration of jumbled scenes. In Experiment 2, gridlines were added to both normal and jumbled scenes to control for the number of line terminators, and scene structure had no effect. In Experiment 3, participants performed a secondary task that required paying attention to scene structure, and scene structure's effect on duration judgements reemerged. These findings are consistent with the idea that perceived duration can depend on visual–cognitive processing, which in turn depends on both the nature of the stimulus and the goals of the observer.