Janet L. Jackson

Time, Mind, and Behavior

1. Introduction: The Psychology of Time.- I. Origins: The Nature and Development of Time.- 2. The Compleat Time Experiencer.- 3. Brain Time and Mind Time.- 4. The Use of the Biological Clocks in Time Perception.- 5. From Biotemporality to Nootemporality: Toward an Integrative and Comparative View of Time in Behavior.- 6. Timing Behavior in Young Children: A Developmental Approach to Conditioned Spaced Responding.- II. Processes: The Perception and Retention of Time.- 7. Time Psychophysics and Related Models.- 8. The Effects of Time Pressure on Duration Discrimination.- 9. The Detection of Anisochrony in Monaural and Interaural Sequences.- 10. Memory for Temporal Information.- 11. Contextual Coding in Memory: Studies of Remembered Duration.- 12. Is the Processing of Temporal Information Automatic or Controlled?.- III. Patterns: The Structure and Organization of Time.- 13. Structural Organization of Events in Time.- 14. Time, Rhythms and Tension: In Search of the Determinants of Rhythmicity.- 15. Timing in Action.- 16. A Functional View of Prosodic Timing in Speech.- 17. Time, Size and Shape in Handwriting: Exploring Spatio-temporal Relationships at Different Levels.- IV. Notions:The Concept and Meaning of Time.- 18. Semantics of Time.- 19. The Development of Temporal Inferences and Meanings in 5- to 8-Year Old Children.- 20: Temporality and Metaphor.- Author Index.

ATTENTIONAL EFFORT AND COGNITIVE STRATEGIES IN THE PROCESSING OF TEMPORAL INFORMATION

For many, many years the study of temporal phenomena in human experience has progressed along two virtually disconnected lines: time psychology proper and the study of the temporal organization of memory. Time psychology dealt largely with the psychophysics of duration, with the rate of flow of subjective time and with the experience of the so-called “specious present.” Memory research, on the other hand, studied the sequential organization of stimulus events-rder and position of items in a series-and serial recall. Only recently do the two trickles appear to be merging into a single stream that may even be heading towards its first rapid. A burning question-to be answered, perhaps, in this volume-is whether the many and varied phenomena, flow, present, duration and order, may indeed be treated as manifestations of a coherent set of processes or, instead, only as a collection of essentially unrelated processes that entertain only superficial relations to each other. Until further notice we prefer to adhere to the first view, relying, perhaps somewhat naively, on William of Ockham’s advice not to multiply explanatory concepts beyond necessity. In this paper we shall discuss some views and some results that may contribute towards answering the question: How is conscious time experience connected to memory for lag and order? Before tracing our main theme, however, we shall outline our general views on the nature, or status, of psychological time.

Focussing on aging: An electrophysiological exploration of spatial and attentional processing during reading

Three types of selective attention tasks were presented to 24 young (20.5 years) and 24 middle-aged (57.5 years) participants. The major aim of the experiment was to explore three different aspects of selective attention, namely a pre-attentive level (i.e. auditory passive oddball task), an attentive level using spatial attention in a memory search task (i.e. selective search task) and an attentive level using a spatial cue to select a word in a reading-like situation (i.e. selective language task). The data showed that the mismatch negativity was not affected by aging although the ERPs indicated that the younger participants were paying more attention to the tones than the middle-aged. The selective search task data showed that spatial selective attention is only mildly affected by aging. The ERP-data seemed to indicate that irrelevant stimuli had a smaller impact in the middle-aged. The selective language data showed a look-a-like effect of flanker words for both age groups although the effect in the middle-aged was delayed by 30 ms and smaller. It was theorized that flankers might have smaller impact in the middle-aged. N400 was found to be smaller and delayed (90 ms) in the middle-aged participants. The overall conclusion on the basis of the three experiments is that the selectivity of processing was preserved or even enhanced in our particular group of middle-aged participants.

Priming and aging: An electrophysiological investigation of N400 and recall

Twenty young (20.5 years) and 20 middle-aged academics (57.2 years) performed a priming-recall task which was presented in three blocks. In each block, participants read 40 word pairs after which a recall task had to be carried out. Half of the word pairs were highly associated while the others were low associated. Targets showed the N400 of the middle-aged group to be both delayed and smaller in amplitude for low-associated items. N400 of primes, however, showed no age-related latency difference but was smaller for the middle-aged group due to a positive shift. It is argued that this shift possibly indicates age differences in semantic activation or buildup of context. A reanalysis showed individual differences in word pair processing to depend on recall performance. In general, high recallers were found to show a much larger differentiation between low- and high-associated targets. This resulted from a much larger N400 component elicited by low-associated targets and a more positive ERP in the N400-region for the high-associated targets. It is suggested that the middle-aged subjects activated the expected target word to a level at least equivalent to the younger subjects, but that the activated network itself was larger/less selective particularly in subjects showing a low recall.

Introduction: The Psychology of Time

Time is a fascinating subject!This much is evident from the innumerable arguments raised in the course of twenty-five centuries of philosophical debate. The presocratic philosophers already showed a lively interest in the nature of time and formulated many of the questions that are still of fundamental concern to humankind. Is time real or an artifact of the way mortals look at things? Is time a sense impression or is it an idea, that is, a mental construction forced upon us by the innate properties of our minds? The mind-boggling complexities emerging from this debate can be traced in numerous disguises through the ages, up to the present day, and quite a few authors have done admirable jobs by summarizing the different positions or by providing anthologies of indispensable primary sources (e.g. Sivadjian, 1938; Whitrow, 1960; Smart, 1964; Gale, 1968; Sherover, 1975).

The Processing of Temporal Information

Our research sets out to explore whether temporal information is dealt with as an inevitable automatic byproduct of information processing in general, or whether temporal information processing in itself requires a specific cognitive effort, such as use of adequate rehearsal and/or encoding strategies. In examining this question three response measures found to vary in level of difficulty will be used: 1. Order judgments: Which of two items appeared earlier in a series? 2. Lag judgments: How many items were presented between two such items? 3 . Position judgments: Give the absolute positions of items in a series. An attempt is made to compare and evaluate these measures in relation to the underlying processes. In the first experiment to be described, the question asked was: What effect does depth of processing have on the retention of temporal information? It is known that deeper processing improves recall; therefore, does it also increase the retention of temporal information? Subjects were shown a series of 25 concrete words. In the “deep” condition, they were asked whether the word fitted a sentence; while in the “shallow” condition, the task was to check the word for a given letter. After presentation, an unexpected temporal-order task (either order, lag, or position judgment) was given. A control group performed a free recall task. The results show that although semantic processing produces moderate item recall, it does not produce adequate order retention. Performance in all temporal tasks is very low, barely reaching chance level in the easiest task, namely, order judgments. These results suggest that deliberate effort such as use of adequate encoding and/or rehearsal strategies is necessary for temporal coding to take place. The second experiment takes a closer look at rehearsal strategies, which are known to increase with age. The question explored is whether the processing of temporal information is influenced by such developmental trends. Subjects in this experiment were 5and 1 I-year-old children who were presented with series of either 7 or 28 pictures. Half of each age group was given a serial rehearsal instruction, while the other half received no such instruction. The position task which followed presentation was expected. (To match the short 7-picture series, the long series were blocked into 7 units of 4 positions each.) Although both age groups performed better on short series, a developmental effect in position judgments was found, suggesting that as rehearsal processing increases, so too does temporal information. Because of poor fulfillment of rehearsal instructions by 5-year-old children, the expected improvement over the no-instruction group was not found. With 1 I-year-olds, however, an effect of rehearsal instruction was indeed found in long series, which strongly suggests that the processing of temporal information requires deliberate effort. Though post hoc order judgments derived from position judgments show a slight developmental trend, the most striking effect is the high level of performance in all

Effects of item concreteness on temporal coding

Recently several authors have suggested that coding of serial position in a word list is an automatic process. This contention is questioned in the present paper: two experiments explore the concrete-abstract distinction and show that temporal order retention is higher with concrete than with abstract lists. An alternative view that temporal coding is influenced by either selective attention and/or the selective strategies used by the subjects to meet the requirements set by the memory task is put forward.