Scanning a compressed ordered representation of the future

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Decision Making

Background:

• A theoretical symmetry exists between remembering the past and predicting the future.
• Temporal order judgments are crucial for both memory recall and future anticipation.
• Existing tasks like the judgment of recency (JOR) assess past temporal order.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the psychological processes underlying temporal judgments for both past and future events.
• To introduce and validate a novel task, the judgment of imminence (JOI), for assessing future temporal expectations.
• To compare cognitive models for past recall and future prediction.

Main Methods:

• Conducted a short-term relative judgment of recency (JOR) task for past temporal order.
• Developed and implemented a novel judgment of imminence (JOI) task using probabilistic sequences for future temporal order.
• Analyzed reaction time (RT) data and RT distributions to model cognitive search processes.

Main Results:

• Results for the JOR task replicated previous findings, supporting a backward self-terminating search model on a compressed temporal representation of the past.
• Reaction time distributions in the JOR task were consistent with this backward search model.
• Crucially, JOI task results indicated a forward self-terminating search model operating on a compressed temporal representation of the future.

Conclusions:

• The study provides evidence for distinct cognitive mechanisms governing judgments about the past versus the future.
• A backward search model explains memory for recent events, while a forward search model explains expectations of future events.
• These findings highlight a functional asymmetry in temporal cognition, despite theoretical suggestions of symmetry.