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REVIEW article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1402903

Event' as a central construal of psychological time in humans

Provisionally accepted
Sandra Stojić Sandra Stojić 1,2*Zoltan Nadasdy Zoltan Nadasdy 2,3,4
  • 1 Doctoral School of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
  • 2 Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
  • 3 Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States
  • 4 Zeto Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA, Santa Clara, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    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 a comprehensive overview of the rich philosophical, physical, psychological, cognitive, linguistic, and neurophysiological context.

    Keywords: events1, time perception2, event cognition3, duration4, temporal sequencing5, cognitive development6

    Received: 18 Mar 2024; Accepted: 13 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Stojić and Nadasdy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sandra Stojić, Doctoral School of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 1075, Hungary

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.