Event as the central construal of psychological time in humans

Abstract

Time is a fundamental dimension of our perception and mental construction of reality. It enables resolving changes in our environment without a direct sensory representation of elapsed time. Therefore, the concept of time is inferential by nature, but the units of subjective time that provide meaningful segmentation of the influx of sensory input remain to be determined. In this review, we posit that events are the construal instances of time perception as they provide a reproducible and consistent segmentation of the content. In that light, we discuss the implications of this proposal by looking at "events" and their role in subjective time experience from cultural anthropological and ontogenetic perspectives, as well as their relevance for episodic memory. Furthermore, we discuss the significance of "events" for the two critical aspects of subjective time-duration and order. Because segmentation involves parsing event streams according to causal sequences, we also consider the role of causality in developing the concept of directionality of mental timelines. We offer a fresh perspective on representing past and future events before age 5 by an egocentric bi-directional timeline model before acquiring the allocentric concept of absolute time. Finally, we illustrate how the relationship between events and durations can resolve contradictory experimental results. Although "time" warrants a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach, we focus this review on "time perception", the experience of time, without attempting to provide an all encompassing overview of the rich philosophical, physical, psychological, cognitive, linguistic, and neurophysiological context.

Keywords: cognitive development; duration; event cognition; events; ordinality; time perception.

Figure 1

Use of sampling and availability heuristics in temporal cognition. Do both children and adults rely on the events as units to construct a subjective passage of time? A recent study by Stojić et al. (2023) found that children and adults perceive time differently based on the content or the density of events^a, i.e., while children focus on the number of events, the adults pay attention to the gaps between them, i.e., the so-called event boundaries. In a screening of the eventful (action-packed material made of several segments with defined “beginning” and “ending” and narratable content) and eventless cartoons (monotonous and repetitive actions with a single episode and, therefore, no storyline) despite objectively equal duration and a balanced number of characters as well as moving elements, different age groups claimed cartoons as different in durations. Such finding was attributed to different decision-making processes in children and adults–children use the availability heuristic, or the “how much they can talk about something” rule, and adults rely on the sampling heuristic, or the “how many times they were able to sample the flow of an absolute time” rule. ^aConsidering the lack of a universal definition, in this context, the events are meant to be narratable, with a distinctive beginning and ending, following Zacks and Tversky's (2001) event segmentation theory.

Figure 2

Illustration of the bi-directional model where the same-colored points in space-time represent the equidistant locations relative to self, further suggesting they are both acquired at/around the same time/developmental stage irrespective of the direction—past or future. Our bi-directional model adheres to the undifferentiated stage when time is egocentric and not yet unidirectional. We proposed that this undifferentiated time/space concept only lasts until the child replaces it with the more differentiated Newtonian concept of absolute time and space around school age. Before that transition happens, children between 4 and 6 often resort to the sequence of events to intuit duration when they have to, expressed by event density as an estimate of time.