As mentioned in the preface, the aim of this book is to provide the reader with an introduction to what I believe to be the most important areas of time perception over the last 30 or 40 years. It is focussed mainly on the psychology of timing in humans, although Chap. 9 discusses animal timing. Animal timing has been an important precursor of ideas in the contemporary study of time perception in humans, mostly through the development of scalar expectancy theory (SET), initially proposed to explain animal timing, but in some ways the dominant theory of human timing until recently, and perhaps still. In general, however, the study of animal learning and behaviour plays a much smaller role in psychology today than in the past, and so presenting a very extensive account of animal timing early in this book seemed inappropriate, and likely to discourage many readers. To address this, I have placed the topic of animal timing in Chap. 9, where readers will find some of the most intellectually fascinating ideas in the whole of the field of time perception. Chapter 2 discusses a little of the philosophy of time, and some of the history of time perception research leading to the development of internal clock theories of human timing, which have been so influential. Chapter 3 discusses SET, the principal internal clock-based account of human timing, itself a variant of an earlier theory proposed by Treisman (1963). An appendix to that chapter presents an elementary account of some of the mathematics of internal clock theory. SET provides not only a general account of human performance on many timing tasks, but also specific theoretical models, notably the performance on tasks involving temporal generalization and bisection, which have been widely used, particularly the latter. Theoretical accounts of generalization and bisection, whether based directly on SET or otherwise, are discussed in Chap. 4. In that chapter, mathematical exposition is kept to a minimum, largely as a result of my own lack of competence. A reader wishing to understand some of the basic mechanics of SET-based models, which have been particularly important in areas such as the developmental psychology of time, will find here what I hope are simple accounts of their operation. Chapter 5 considers the role of cognitive processes such as attention and executive function in time perception, but also discusses fairly recent work on emotion and time perception. Chapter 6 examines retrospective timing, or ātiming without a timer,ā and passage of time judgements, including work from sociology and occupational psychology that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream time perception literature. In this chapter I also spend some time discussing the contents of Ornsteinās (1969) book, On the Experience of Time, which is frequently cited, probably little read, and these days rather difficult to obtain. Chapter 7 deals with timing in children. I begin with a discussion of Piagetian time psychology, with an account of some of the material in Piagetās book The Childās Conception of Time. This is another classic, and once again, I suspect, one that is little read, although the peculiarities and obscurity of the work give modern readers good excuses to avoid it. Later researchers in the Piagetian tradition, on the other hand, have developed Piagetās ideas in a more digestible manner, and I discuss some of their work. The later part of this chapter discusses more recent research on timing in children, some of it inspired by SET. In Chap. 8 I review some of the work related to timing and ageing, including both laboratory studies and research on time experience in āreal life,ā with some discussion of the vexed question of whether time seems to āgo fasterā as people age. Chapter 9, mentioned earlier, introduces some of the main findings from, and theoretical models applied to, animal timing research. Readers jaded by the hegemony of SET will find interesting competitors to it here. Chapter 10 is a kind of appendix, outlining some of the commonest methods used in time perception research. Readers unfamiliar with time perception studies will find outlines of some of the principal methods used here.
I should emphasize at the outset that this volume is not intended to be a āpopular scienceā account of the psychology of time perception, but neither is it intended to be a highly technical work comprehensible only to specialists in the field. In this book, I have tried to introduce and explain the main trends in fairly recent time perception research in a way that should be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of psychology. I can only hope that I have succeeded with this aim, at least in part.
References
Ornstein, R. E. (1969). On the experience of time. London: Penguin.
Treisman, M. (1963). Temporal discrimination and the indifference interval: Implications for a model of the āinternal clockā. Psychological Monographs, 77, whole number 576.
Philosophers and Time
The second part of Cardinal Newmanās poem
The Dream of Gerontius, set to music so vividly by Edward Elgar, describes the progress of the soul of Gerontius towards its judgement while beholding the sight of God. Newman tries to describe a situation without time, which the deceased Gerontius expresses like this:
How still it is!
I hear no more the busy beat of time,
No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;
Nor does one moment differ from the next.
Even with the augmentation of imagination that poetry sometimes elicits, this situation seems literally impossible for most people to conceive of (and for Newman as well: in the poem, events follow one another, occurring in a clear temporal sequence). The passage of time as a succession of events, or the feeling of passage of time during a persisting stimulus, seems such a necessary part of our everyday experience, that it is natural to suggest it is in some way primordial and something that is essential for us to make sense of our impressions and the progress of our mental life.
Philosophers have long been fascinated by the nature of time and how we perceive it. Nichols (1891) provides a summary of many philosophical positions regarding time that were advanced through the late nineteenth century. One issue that divided philosophers and that has had practical consequences for the psychology of time is the question of whether the perception of time is innate or is based on some prior experience.
Kant, in his celebrated
Critique of Pure Reason (
1781/1900/2003), proposed that a sense of time existed a priori, along with the appreciation of space, as something innate and independent of experience. For example (p. 28)
Time is not an empirical conception. For neither co-existence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist a prioriā¦Time is a necessary representation, lying at the foundation of all our intuitions. With regard to phenomena in general, we cannotā¦represent them to ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well represent to ourselves time devoid of phenomena.
In addition, he argues (p. 29) that
ā¦the conception of motionā¦.is possible only through and in the representation of timeā¦
There is empirical research with children on the relations between time and changeāand in particular, time and motionāand it is discussed in Chap. 7. As work reviewed there shows, it seems that judgements of time, or judgements of duration at least, are if anything more difficult to master than concepts like distance or size. Children also have considerable difficulty extracting the dimension of duration from other aspects of the situation presented to them. For example, if asked to judge which of two toy cars ran for the longer period of time, young children have difficulty dissociating the duration of the movement from the distance traversed. None of this suggests that time, at least in the form of conscious appreciation of duration, is an a priori phenomenon. However, as other research shows, particularly that reviewed in Chaps. 7 and 9, very young children who have not learned to speak and non-human animals can be trained to adjust to the temporal requirements of experimental situations, suggesting that sensitivity to temporal regularities in the environment is not dependent on the possession of language that might provide the cognitive concepts of time familiar to adults.
The Kantian concept that time is a āgivenā contrasts sharply with the position of Guyau (
1890). Guyauās
La genĆØse de lāidĆ©e de temps not only explores the question of how time representations develop, but also speculatesāoften with arguments that appear strikingly modernāabout many aspects of time perception that would later come to occupy the attention of experimental psychologists. Guyau was certain that notions of time could not exist a priori, and instead developed with experience from a number of sources. The quotes from Guyau that follow are in my own translation.
The genesis of the idea of time is ā¦.empirical and derived. The idea of time, like that of space, is empirically the result of the adaptation of our activity and our desiresā¦ (p. 46).
The relation between the perception of time and space was also thought to be important, with concepts of time developing later than conceptions of space, according to Guyau, a position in accord with modern research, as mentioned above.
It is movement in space which creates time in human consciousness. Without movement there is no time (p. 47)
But time concepts were also believed to be derived from
ā¦the notion of discrimination of differences, resemblances, numberā¦and intensity (p. 22)
Guyauās ideas have been particularly influential among French-speaking psychologists, who have made substantial contributions to the study of time perception in general and, more specifically, to the developmental psychology of time, discussed in Chap. 7, where the issue of how temporal representations develop in young children has been of central importance. Guyauās ideas, however, also prefigure more recent discussions on the role of cognitive processes in time perception (Chap. 5), as well as ideas about āretrospectiveā time judgements (Chap. 6).
One question which has received particular attention from philosophers is what constitutes the present moment, or what James (1890) and others have called the specious pre...
