Participants from ages 5 to 99 years completed 2 time estimation tasks: a temporal generalization task and a temporal bisection task. Developmental differences in overall levels of performance were found at both ends of the life span and were more marked on the generalization task than the bisection task. Older adults and children performed at lower levels than young adults, but there were also qualitative differences in the patterns of errors made by the older adults and the children. To capture these findings, the authors propose a new developmental model of temporal generalization and bisection. The model assumes developmental changes across the life span in the noisiness of initial perceptual encoding and across childhood in the extent to which long-term memory of time intervals is distorted.

We outline a dual systems approach to temporal cognition, which distinguishes between two cognitive systems for dealing with how things unfold over time – a temporal updating system and a temporal reasoning system – of which the former is both phylogenetically and ontogenetically more primitive than the latter, and which are at work alongside each other in adult human cognition. We describe the main features of each of the two systems, the types of behavior the more primitive temporal updating system can support, and the respects in which it is more limited than the temporal reasoning system. We then use the distinction between the two systems to interpret findings in comparative and developmental psychology, arguing that animals operate only with a temporal updating system and that children start out doing so too, before gradually becoming capable of thinking and reasoning about time. After this, we turn to adult human cognition and suggest that our account can also shed light on a specific feature of humans’ everyday thinking about time that has been the subject of debate in the philosophy of time, which consists in a tendency to think about the nature of time itself in a way that appears ultimately self-contradictory. We conclude by considering the topic of intertemporal choice, and argue that drawing the distinction between temporal updating and temporal reasoning is also useful in the context of characterizing two distinct mechanisms for delaying gratification.

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This paper addresses two questions. At a general level, our concern is with whether human identification and discrimination of short temporal durations can be described in terms of the same principles that are known to characterise identification and discrimination of other simple perceptual stimuli (e.g., weights, loudnesses, or line lengths). Is a unified account possible? Recent models of timing have been developed independently from earlier traditions of modeling perceptual identification and discrimination; here in contrast we argue that similar principles may apply in both cases.A second, more specific, issue that we address concerns shifts in the temporal bisection point (the duration that is equally likely to be judged the same as the shortest or longest magnitude in a stimulus set). Several models of timing have proposed accounts of bisection point shifts that are specific to temporal processing; here we argue that a more general account of bisection point shifts can be given in terms of a model developed outside the temporal domain: Range Frequency Theory (RFT; e.g., Parducci, 1965Parducci, , 1995. The predictions of this claim are explored with a simple mathematical model, which we term Temporal Range Frequency Theory, and tested in two experiments. Models of timing.Over the past decade, understanding of human timing has been advanced through the use of temporal generalization and temporal bisection tasks. In the temporal generalization task, participants are exposed to a standard stimulus of a fixed duration. They then judge whether or not subsequently presented stimuli are of the same duration as the standard. Here we focus on temporal bisection tasks, a variety of which have been developed for use with human adults and children

Background. The ability to encode time cues underlies many cognitive processes. In the light of schizophrenic patients' compromised cognitive abilities in a variety of domains, it is noteworthy that there are numerous reports of these patients displaying impaired timing abilities. However, the timing intervals that patients have been evaluated on in prior studies vary considerably in magnitude (e.g. 1 s, 1 min, 1 h etc.).