Foraging efficiency in temporally predictable environments: is a long-term temporal memory really advantageous?

Cognitive abilities enabling animals that feed on ephemeral but yearly renewable resources to infer when resources are available may have been favoured by natural selection, but the magnitude of the benefits brought by these abilities remains poorly known. Using computer simulations, we compared the efficiencies of three main types of foragers with different abilities to process temporal information, in spatially and/or temporally homogeneous or heterogeneous environments. One was endowed with a sampling memory, which stores recent experience about the availability of the different food types. The other two were endowed with a chronological or associative memory, which stores long-term temporal information about absolute times of these availabilities or delays between them, respectively. To determine the range of possible efficiencies, we also simulated a forager without temporal cognition but which simply targeted the closest and possibly empty food sources, and a perfectly prescient forager, able to know at any time which food source was effectively providing food. The sampling , associative and chronological foragers were far more efficient than the forager without temporal cognition in temporally predictable environments, and interestingly, their efficiencies increased with the level of temporal heterogeneity. The use of a long-term temporal memory results in a foraging efficiency up to 1.16 times better ( chronological memory) or 1.14 times worse ( associative memory) than the use of a simple sampling memory. Our results thus show that, for everyday foraging, a long-term temporal memory did not provide a clear benefit over a simple short-term memory that keeps track of the current resource availability. Long-term temporal memories may therefore have emerged in contexts where short-term temporal cognition is useless, i.e. when the anticipation of future environmental changes is strongly needed.

Alexithymia Is Linked with a Negative Bias for Past and Current Events in Healthy Humans

Although research provides a rich literature about the influence of emotional states on temporal cognition, evidence about the influence of the style of emotion processing, as a personality trait, on temporal cognition is extremely limited. We provide a novel contribution to the field by exploring the relationship between difficulties of identifying and describing feelings and emotions (alexithymia) and time perspective. One hundred and forty-two healthy participants completed an online version of the TAS-20 scale, which measures alexithymia, and the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, which monitors individual differences in time-orientation regarding the past, present, and future. The results show greater attention to past negative aspects in participants whose TAS-20 score was indicating borderline or manifest alexithymia, as compared to non-alexithymic individuals. Moreover, the higher the TAS-20 score, the higher the tendency was to focus on negative aspects of the past and interpret the present fatalistically. These results suggest that difficulties in identifying and describing feelings and emotions are associated with a negative bias for past and present events. Theoretical and clinical implications of this finding are discussed.

Unweaving the embodied nature of English temporal prepositions

The metaphor time is space (Lakoff & Johnson 1999) and the pervasiveness of metaphor and image-schematic structure in human conceptualization (Johnson 1987; Hampe 2005) have been widely accepted among cognitive scientists as constructs that help explain non-spatial and temporal linguistic constructions. However, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) might not be the whole story. While it is acceptable that moments in time can be construed as being analogous to points in space as in utterances such as at the corner vs. at 2:30, there seems to be much more temporal cognition than previously thought. It turns out that time exhibits its own structure (following Evans 2004, 2013; Galton 2011) that is based on transience. This idea has made some scholars support the weak version of CMT which posits that the temporal meaning of prepositions is represented and processed independently of the corresponding spatial meanings (see Kemmerer 2005 for such a view). The present article supports the idea that spatial and temporal structures complement each other in order to achieve temporal conceptions. This is indeed a conceptual pattern showed by the English preposition at that makes use of an extrinsic temporal reference to activate its temporal semantics. To analyze the different temporal realizations that at may have, the paper aims to identify the topological structure that underlies the conceptual basis of this preposition. This allows us to appreciate how the spatio-conceptual structure of at partially structures temporal conceptions. The paper also identifies the nature of the temporal structure that is involved in temporal realizations. The article concludes with some remarks, among them the pivotal role of the schematic temporal structure that is captured by the extrinsic temporal reference, and the role of conceptual metaphor in underdetermining temporal thinking.

‘No idea of time’: Parents report differences in autistic children’s behaviour relating to time in a mixed-methods study

An emerging body of research suggests that temporal processing may be disrupted in autistic children, although little is known about behaviours relating to time in daily life. In the present study, 113 parents of autistic and 201 parents of neurotypical children (aged 7–12 years) completed the It’s About Time questionnaire and open-ended questions about their child’s behaviour relating to time. The questionnaire scores were lower in the autistic compared with the neurotypical group, suggesting that behaviours are affected. Three key themes were identified using thematic analysis: autistic children had problems with temporal knowledge, learning about concepts relating to time, such as how to use the clock and language around time. There were differences in prospection with autistic children having more difficulties with how they thought about the future and prepared themselves for upcoming events. The final theme, monotropism, described how autistic children viewed their time as precious so they could maximise engagement in their interests. The present study indicates that behaviours relating to time can have a considerable impact on the daily lives of autistic children and their families. Further work exploring the development of temporal cognition in autism would be valuable for targeting effective educational and clinical support. Lay abstract Many everyday activities require us to organise our behaviours with respect to time. There is some evidence that autistic children have problems with how they perceive and understand time. However, little is currently known about this, or the ways in which behaviours related to time are impacted in daily life. In this study, 113 parents of autistic children and 201 parents of neurotypical children completed a questionnaire and open-ended questions about their child’s behaviour relating to time. Questionnaire scores were lower in the autistic group compared with neurotypicals, which suggests that behaviours relating to time are affected in autistic children. The open-ended responses further confirmed that the autistic children struggled with time and that this impacted on them and their family. Three key themes were identified. Theme 1: autistic children have problems with learning about concepts relating to time such as telling the time from a clock and using words to describe time (hours, minutes, etc.) appropriately. Theme 2: autistic children think about the future differently. Planning and working under time pressure were described as a problem. Theme 3: autistic children have strong interests which take up a lot of their attention and worrying about having sufficient time to pursue these interests causes anxiety. This research indicates that behaviours related to time can have a considerable impact on the lives of autistic children and that targeted support may be required.

Processing of Different Temporal Scales in the Human Brain

While recalling life events, we reexperience events of different durations, ranging across varying temporal scales, from several minutes to years. However, the brain mechanisms underlying temporal cognition are usually investigated only in small-scale periods—milliseconds to minutes. Are the same neurocognitive systems used to organize memory at different temporal scales? Here, we asked participants to compare temporal distances (time elapsed) to personal events at four different temporal scales (hour, day, week, and month) under fMRI. Cortical activity showed temporal scale sensitivity at the medial and lateral parts of the parietal lobe, bilaterally. Activity at the medial parietal cortex also showed a gradual progression from large- to small-scale processing, along a posterior–anterior axis. Interestingly, no sensitivity was found along the hippocampal long axis. In the medial scale-sensitive region, most of the voxels were preferentially active for the larger scale (month), and in the lateral region, scale selectivity was higher for the smallest scale (hour). These results demonstrate how scale-selective activity characterizes autobiographical memory processing and may provide a basis for understanding how the human brain processes and integrates experiences across timescales in a hierarchical manner.