Processing of Temporal Information and the Cognitive Theory of Time Experience

For man as an information processing system, time is one of the experiential dimensions of information, and it should be considered equivalent to other, non-temporal, aspects of this information, such as intensity, size, etc. Since as a processor man has a limited capacity there will be necessarily a trade-off between temporal and non-temporal information, which is open to quantification. Research in this area is reviewed. Most contemporary models of time evaluation incorporate a-specific “pulse counter” mechanisms to account for the internal clock by which time is measured subjectively. The rate of this internal clock is thought to be influenced by the information processed by the subject. In this paper an alternative formulation is defended: time evaluation is a cognitive reconstruction of contents of the interval. The latter formulation avoids the unnecessary assumption of the former. It explains the same phenomena equally well, while moreover it can handle various matters that offer difficulties to models stated in terms of clock mechanisms.