Rasmus Pedersen

A new explanatory challenge of time perception presented by Gerardo Viera (2020) lies in reconciling three different ways time appears perceptually unified with the empirical data of how the mechanisms underlying time perception are fragmented and dissociable. Viera (2020) argues that existing models of time perception that locate this unity at the level of the mechanisms fail to meet this explanatory challenge. I propose that this challenge can be met if we adopt Pedersen’s (2024) hybrid theory of temporal binding. This theory accounts for the temporal organisation of perception without taking it to be a function of synchronous processing or some centralised temporal integration mechanism. Instead, this organisation depends on the attentional modulation of hybrid retrodictive and predictive sensory processing. Effectively, the accounts suggest that temporal organisation of perception is achieved through selective attentional modulation that biases perception towards representing some subset sensory features that make up coherent and behaviourally useful perceptions. I explain how we can use this theory to account for the different kinds of perceived unity of time while also accounting for the disunified organisation of the underlying mechanisms. This view entails that we should deflate the phenomenological richness of this perceived unity relative to the limits and selectivity of attention.

Our ability to envision the future is often taken to play a central role in temporally extended agency. Yet it remains unclear whether and how mental imagery (perception-like mental states that present us with sensory information without a direct external stimulus) contributes to core aspects of temporally extended agency such as how we encode, retain, and retrieve intentions to act. This paper argues that empirical progress on this requires a shift in methodology. Existing experimental studies investigate the role of mental imagery by comparing the accuracy and speed with which people retrieve intentions that have been encoded via verbal rehearsal compared to rehearsal via mental imagery. However, these studies yield mixed and conflicting results. I argue that this may be due to methodological issues that follow from the unjustified assumption that these task instructions can isolate the role of imagery and from ignoring that mental imagery is a capacity that varies across individuals. To address these issues, I propose that future empirical studies should make use of the naturally occurring extreme variation in imagery vividness that exists between aphantasics (individuals with little or no imagery) and hyperphantasics (individuals with extremely vivid imagery). Drawing on recent evidence linking lower imagery vividness to less detailed episodic thinking, I argue that imagery-dependent strategies for encoding, retaining, and retrieving intentions to act—if they exist—should be unavailable to aphantasics and readily available to hyperphantasics. I conclude by outlining testable hypotheses and some suggested tests that could help clarify whether and how mental imagery influences temporally extended agency.

This thesis develops a theory of temporal binding, the process by which we temporally integrate sensory features into perceptual experiences. Psychophysical and neurophysiological findings have revealed a remarkable amount of detail into how we engage in temporal binding. However, existing theories in psychology or philosophy do not adequately account for the adaptive and flexible nature of temporal binding, nor do they explain how our capacity to engage in temporal binding connects with our experiences of time more broadly. This thesis addresses these gaps. In Chapter 1, I identify three explanatory problems that a theory of temporal binding must address. It must: (i) account for the many variables that influence temporal binding, (ii) address what I call the problems of neural delay and desynchronisation, and (iii) explicate the relation between the mechanisms underlying temporal binding and our apparent perceptual experiences of time. Chapter 2 argues that so-called brain time theories, which take temporal binding to be the result of synchrony in neural processing, fail to address problems (i) and (ii). In response, I advance my own hybrid theory of temporal binding in Chapter 3. I claim that temporal integration relies on how predictive processing and retrodictive processing are modulated by attention. This theory explains (i) and (ii) by presenting temporal binding as a flexible and adaptive hybrid process that is sensitive to goals, expectations, and actions. I present a range of consequences that follow from this. Chapter 4 addresses how the hybrid theory explains (iii) the explanatory gap between our apparent perceptual experiences of time and the dissociable and fragmented mechanisms that underlie time perception. According to the hybrid theory, our phenomenology that time is perceptually unified is imposed on the world through the attentional modulation of predictive and retrodictive processing. This explanation proposes an alternative to theories that propose the empirically implausible view that the perceived unity is inherited from unity in the mechanisms underlying time perception. While my explanation comes at the ‘cost’ of deflating the phenomenology of our perceived unity of time, these deflations are based on empirically justified arguments. Finally, Chapter 5 presents a framework for empirically testing predictions that the hybrid theory makes about temporal binding. This involves examining three questions about the relation between how the content and our apparent phenomenology of temporal binding depend on attention. I present some hypotheses concerning these questions and new animations that can be used to develop empirical tests of these hypotheses. I end by presenting multiple ways in which we may subjectively inflate the phenomenological richness of our experiences of temporal binding.

Formal recognition of research contributions is critical for career advancement and the allocation of research funding. However, some contributions are mentioned only in the acknowledgments section, which are not indexed by scholarly databases, resulting in little recognition for those involved. We contextualize this shortfall in terms of contributorship, the movement to recognize specific research contributions rather than rely solely on authorship. Broadening the range of recognized individuals is currently advanced largely through reducing authorship restrictions and unbundling manuscripts into smaller elements, such as datasets and protocols, that receive their own attributions. Here we focus on a complementary path, enhancing the contents and metadata of acknowledgments sections. Capitalizing on existing infrastructure and standards, we propose: 1) when acknowledging individuals, authors include ORCIDs (subject to the acknowledgees’ approval) and provide CRediT information where applicable; 2) publishers solicit identities of acknowledgees in a similar way to how they do so for authors in their submission portals; and 3) publishers include metadata of acknowledgees in JATS-XML files. Implementing these steps should encourage scholarly databases to index non-author contributors. The ensuing increase in visibility for research contributors, such as technicians and library professionals, should result in greater recognition of non-author roles.

Contributorship refers to indicating who did what in a project, going beyond a simple list of authors. In scholarly journal articles about a project, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) has become a popular way to provide individual contribution information, often with accompanying machine-readable metadata. While CRediT is used by hundreds of scientific journals, the official version of CRediT exists only in English. To support scientific publishers and researchers writing in other languages, we have created translations of the fourteen CRediT roles and their descriptions into thirty-six languages. To ensure high quality, at least one speaker fluent in the target language drafted the translation, with additional involvement of a second fluent person. Because hundreds of scientific journals publish non-English work, the use of our translations could improve the recognition of the associated researchers’ contributions. We have contacted relevant publishers and academic organizations to make them more aware of CRediT, of our translations, and of contributorship generally. To conclude, we discuss the potential for CRediT and other ontologies to be applied more broadly, for example to facilitate greater recognition of people who are not co-authors but are named in Acknowledgments sections.

In this paper, I argue that none of three different ways one can cash out the brain time theory provides a satisfactory general theory of how we temporally bind sensory features into perceptions of coherent perceptions of synchrony. In general, brain time theories state that the time at which sensory features are perceived as occurring relative to each other is fully determined by the time at which sensory features finish processing, i.e., reach their perceptual endpoints. I describe three different versions of brain time theories that differ in terms of how perceptual endpoints are defined. One defines perceptual endpoints in terms of local linear processing, another in terms of local linear and non-linear processing, and a third adds the possibility of perceptual endpoints determined by global non-linear processing. I evaluate each of these relative to how well they can account for two problems that I argue any theory of temporal binding must account for. These are the problems of neural delay and desynchronisation. The first problem concerns accounting for how our perceptual system overcomes delays in neural processing, such that we can perceive events in the world in a timely manner to guide judgments and actions. The second problem concerns accounting for how our perceptual system manages to temporally bind features, such that we can perceptually experience the synchrony relations and temporal order of multimodal events when our brain processes different features at different speeds. I argue that no version of the brain time theory provides a satisfying account of both problems. I end by proposing a way forward.

One proposed explanation for a particular kind of temporal preference lies in a disparity between the emotional intensity of memory compared to anticipation. According to the memory/anticipation disparity explanation, the utility of anticipation of a particular event if that event is future, whether positive or negative, is greater than the utility of retrospection of that same event if it is past, whether positive or negative, and consequently, overall utility is maximised when we prefer negative events to be located in the past rather than the future, and positive ones in the future rather than the past. To have this preference is to be (at least apparently) future biased. If this explanation is correct, it would tend to confer rational justification upon these preferences. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. Our results suggest that, at most, this explanation might be a partial one of some people’s preferences some of the time, rather than a general explanation of future bias. In turn, this lends some indirect support to a competing explanation that appeals to temporal asymmetries in emotion and attention. Since that explanation would arguably tend not to confer rational justification upon (apparently) future-biased preferences, we argue that our findings provide some reason to be sceptical that these preferences are, in general, rationally justified.

This paper sets forward a novel theory of temporal binding, a mechanism that integrates the temporal properties of sensory features into coherent perceptual experiences. Specifying a theory of temporal binding remains a widespread problem. The popular ‘brain time theory’ suggests that the temporal content of perceptual experiences is determined by when sensory features complete processing. However, this theory struggles to explain how perceptual experiences can accurately reflect the relative timing of sensory features processed at discrepant times. In contrast, ‘event time theories’ suggest that the temporal content of perceptual experiences reflects the relative event time of external sensory features and that the brain accommodates differential processing times. We can formulate retrodictive and predictive versions of this theory. Retrodictive event time theories propose that we accommodate desynchronised processing retrodictively. Predictive event time theories propose that we accommodate desynchronised processing by predictively modelling the event time of sensory features. I argue that both views have strengths and weaknesses. This paper proposes a new hybrid theory that integrates these theories to accommodate these weaknesses. Firstly, I argue how retrodictions and predictions can interact in mutually beneficial ways to ensure speedy and accurate temporal binding. Secondly, I propose how attention plays a central role in flexibly selecting which contents get to be temporally bound. This theory can explain how prediction and retrodiction differentially affect temporal binding and, in turn, proposes a new way to understand temporal binding and has implications for how we should understand conscious experiences.

We investigate the causal manipulability hypothesis, according to which what partly explains (a) why people tend to prefer negative events to be in their further future rather than their nearer future and positive events to be in their nearer future rather than their further future and (b) why people tend to prefer that negative events be located in their past not their future and that positive events be located in their future not their past, is that people tend to discount the value of events they are less able causally to manipulate. If people discount the value of events they are less able to causally manipulate, then since often temporally nearer future events are more causally manipulable than further ones, and since future events are manipulable whereas past ones aren’t, this could explain both (a) and (b). In turn, if the causal manipulability hypothesis is correct, this might suggest that insofar as people’s preferences are explained in this manner, those preferences are rationally permissible, since relative causal manipulability is normatively relevant. Thus, ascertaining whether the causal manipulability hypothesis is true may shed light on the normative status of such preferences. We investigate the cognitively mediated version of the causal manipulability hypothesis, according to which people’s consciously held beliefs about the relative causal manipulability of events explains (a) and (b). Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence in favour of this view. We suggest that either relative causal manipulability plays an explanatory role, but one that is not cognitively mediated, or that it does not play any role, even if it is sometimes associated with other factors, such as probability, that may play a role in explaining some time biased preferences.

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognised disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon, and to recognise that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create the conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel.