http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/duration-cognition-2008.pdf

Time in the mind: Using space to think about time

Experiments on subjective duration 1868-1975: A collection of power function exponents.

Differences in duration judgments made by younger and older adults were reviewed. Previous research is unclear about whether such differences exist and, if so, how they may be explained. The meta-analyses revealed substantial age-related differences. Older adults gave larger verbal estimates and made shorter productions of duration than did younger adults. There were no age-related differences in reproduction of duration or in psychophysical slope relating judged and target duration. Older adults' duration estimates were more variable than were those of younger ones. Findings are discussed in terms of pacemaker rate and attentional resources. An explanation regarding divided attention between nontemporal and temporal information processing best explains the findings.

/pdf/human-aging-and-duration-judgments-a-meta-analytic-review-1cs0iafx1x.pdf

Human Aging and Duration Judgments: A Meta-Analytic Review

The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed. Yet, experimental evidence has reopened debate about the extent to which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time. In this article, I will first analyze an influential argument against the Whorfian hypothesis and show that its anti-Whorfianconclusionisinpartanartifactofconflatingtwodistinctquestions:Dowe think in language? and Does language shape thought? Next, I will discuss crosslinguistic differences in spatial metaphors for time and describe experiments that demonstrate corresponding differences in nonlinguistic mental representations. Finally, I will sketch a simple learning mechanism by which some linguistic relativity effects appear to arise. Althoughpeoplemaynotthinkinlanguage,speakersofdifferentlanguages developdistinctive conceptual repertoires as a consequence of ordinary and presumably universal neural and cognitive processes. Are our own concepts of ‘time,’ ‘space,’ and ‘matter’ given in substantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages? (Whorf, 1939/2000, p. 138) Does language shape thought? Do crosslinguistic differences in the lexicon or grammar have nonlinguistic consequences, such that people who talk differently end up thinking differently in corresponding ways? If so, how does this happen: What features of language affect which cognitive processes and What are the mechanisms? Since Benjamin Whorf directed scholars’ attention to this

/pdf/who-s-afraid-of-the-big-bad-whorf-crosslinguistic-3yhcv2d8er.pdf

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek-speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer distance, or a longer time?). Results showed a reliable cross-dimensional asymmetry. For the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of linguistic framing used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space-time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation.

/pdf/space-and-time-in-the-child-s-mind-evidence-for-a-cross-1aug9w1q7t.pdf

John Cohen

Papers

Psychological time in health and disease