Time: Structural alignment and retrospective duration estimates
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The document discusses how temporal metaphors and the methods of estimating duration—prospective and retrospective—impacts subjective time perception in relation to various factors such as task difficulty, contextual changes, and individual differences. It examines models of time perception, brain mechanisms involved, and the effects of cultural beliefs and conditions like Parkinson's disease on duration estimates. The research addresses the concept of structural alignment, suggesting that people's judgments of relative time are influenced by alignable differences between events.
Time: Structural alignment and retrospective duration estimates
- 1. Structural alignment and retrospective duration estimates John L. Dennis & Arthur B. Markman
- 2. what do i do? • temporal metaphors – linguistics/embodied cognition • narrative duration estimates – – fantasy time vs. “reality” time • temporal construal – temporal distance changes representation • subjective duration estimate – structural alignment event comparison
- 3. methodologies • verbal – after experience subjects have to estimate duration in terms of clock ticks • reproduction – subjects delimit a second time period corresponding to their previous experience • production – a duration is stated verbally and subjects are asked to delimit a time period equal to stated duration • comparison – compare current duration to standard duration
- 4. how are estimates made? • prospectively – subjects are aware that they will make an estimate for an upcoming experience – think of waiting – there one’s attention is presumably drawn to time and therefore, one becomes engaged in prospective timing. the result is that time seems protracted. (connection to temporal metaphors)
- 5. how are estimates made? • retrospectively – subjects learn after the fact that they need to make an estimate for their previous experience – think of being engrossed in a task – there one’s attention is presumably not drawn to time and therefore, one becomes disengaged in prospective timing. the result is that time seems contracted.
- 6. task difficulty & methodology • low task difficulty typically leads to longer duration estimates especially for reproduction and verbal – because more attention is allocated for attending to duration • high task difficulty typically leads to longer duration for production and shorter duration for verbal (Chaston & Kingstone, 2004) – because less attention is allocated for attending to duration
- 7. prospective vs. retrospective • stated simply – prospective relies on encoding of temporal information – but retrospective relies on encoding of nontemporal information. • prospective duration are typically longer than remembered durations (Block & Zakay, 1997) • retrospective judgments depend mainly on the retrieval of contextual information encoded during the event. • James (1890), p. 620
- 8. prospective vs. retrospective • all things being equal, as contextual changes increase remembered duration will increase. (Block, 1985; Fraisse, 1963) • changes include – environmental context, mood and type of task, etc. – same task – shorter, change tasks – longer – complex stimuli – longer, simple stimuli – shorter (Ornstein, 1969) – high segmentation – longer (Poynter, 1983; Zakay et al, 1994) – first time task is done – longer, routine – shorter (Avni-Babad & Ritov, 2003) • one caveat – higher contextual change within a routine leads to shorter duration – which leads to the conclusion that when changes become routinized they do not operate as changes anymore. (Avni-Babad & Ritov, 2003).
- 9. individual, population & cultural differences (& caffeine drinkers) • sex differences (Block, Hancock & Zakay, 2000) – in prospective timing women pay more attention to time and have better episodic memory in the retrospective paradigm • older adults give larger verbal estimates and shorter productions of duration & there is no difference for reproduction estimates (Block, Zakay & Hancock, 1998) • for prospective duration estimates – children make larger verbal estimates, shorter reproductions and no difference for productions (Zakay & Hancock, 1999)
- 10. individual, population & cultural differences (& caffeine drinkers) • Parkinson’s Disease patients longer duration estimates than reality (Pastor, et al, 1992) • Schizophrenia patients faster duration estimates than reality and Elvevag (2003) proposes that this may be caused not by memory deficits, but by dysfunctions of biospsychological timing mechanisms (Elvevag, 2003; Tysk, 1983, 1984, 1990)
- 11. individual, population & cultural differences (& caffeine drinkers) • while various cultures differ in terms of beliefs in physical and personal time, but these beliefs do not influence experienced and remembered duration (Hill, et al., 2000; Block, et al., 1996) • caffeine causes participants to have shorter prospective durations, but has no effect for retrospective - not increased clock rate – but increased arousal (Gruber & Block, 2003)
- 12. models • Internal Clock Model – Treisman (1963) • Attentional Model (Thomas & Weaver, 1975) • Temporal Information Processing Model (Gibbon, et al, 1984) • Attentional Gate Model (Block & Zakay, 1996; Zakay & Block, 1995, 1996, 1997; Zakay, 2000) • Lejeune, (1998; 2000) – excellent review and defense of TIP
- 13. models – where do i stand? right now, not sure where I stand in terms of the models, currently it seems to me that TIP is more parsimonious for prospective timing in animals, but that the attentional gate of the AGM is needed for animals – because I believe that Zakay (2000) has argued persuasively that perceptual information processing and attention are largely two independent systems.
- 14. brain mechanisms • currently, I agree with Nobre & O’Reilly (2004) in that while there are core concepts that are shared by most of the models there are significant differences and therefore, how we interpret the specific functional brain areas that contribute to the process relies heavily on the model that is embraced. (more in the paper.)
- 15. but... here is a short list • internal clock linked to basal ganglia (Meck, 1986, Pastor et al., 1992) • some duration judgments linked to cerebellum (Clark et al., 1992) • since time perception has been proposed to rely on numerous underlying cortical networks – the right hemisphere prefrontal- inferior parietal network (Harrington et al., 1998)
- 16. structural alignment • research has shown that similarity is well described as a comparison of structured representations. the process yields commonalities/differences related to the commonalities – i.e., alignable differences, and differences that are not related to commonalities – i.e., nonalignable differences (Markman & Gentner, 1996) • motels vs. hotels or motels vs. trees
- 17. general hypothesis: • the general hypothesis: – structural alignment is that (all else being equal) alignable differences are more focal than nonalignable differences. – People's judgments of the relative time would be affected more by having that target event be alignable to something in the base event.
- 18. radical hypothesis • novel experiences have a protracted sense of duration, and the 2nd time through an experience seems shorter than the 1st. the nonaligned event could be thought of as novel experience and the aligned event could be thought of as the 2nd time through an experience. but if the alignment process causes a target event to be aligned with a longer base event, then we could find that aligned event will have a protracted sense of duration as compared to the nonaligned event. • in this way we could think that the alignment process as “borrowing” the temporal duration of the first event via the alignment process. • maybe not so radical – James (1990) p. 611.
- 19. experiment the general idea is: Base Short Event or Long Event Test AD Event or NAD Event
- 20. experiment the general idea is to examine the role of the alignment process when comparing event sequences. the general prediction of structural alignment is that alignable differences are more focal than nonalignable differences. we hypothesize that peoples judgments of relative time would be more affected by having the second test event be alignable to the base event than if the second test event was nonalignable with the base event.
- 21. experiment the base events vary in terms of their duration – i.e., the number of trials. the base “event” contains two tasks – where for the first task the subject needs to determine whether a “word” was spelled correctly, and for the second task I use the Ponzo illusion and subjects have to determine whether two lines have the same length. The AD test “event” contains two tasks. for the first task subjects need to determine whether a “word” is a word or a nonword, and for the second task I use the Mueller-Lyer illusion and subjects have to determine whether the two lines have the same length. The NAD test “event” contains two tasks, the first task subjects have to count the number of items on the screen and for the second task subjects have to state whether they saw a zero (O) in a brief display of numbers.
- 22. experiment results – to be continued