Time in mind: a multidisciplinary review on temporal perception, cognition, and memory.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Temporal cognition, conceptualized as Mental Time Travel (MTT), involves recalling past events and constructing future scenarios.
• The influence of language, cultural context, psychology, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology on MTT is examined.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the evolutionary origins and cross-species prevalence of temporal cognition.
• To explore how externalizing technologies impact human temporal perception and memory.
• To synthesize interdisciplinary findings on temporal cognition and propose new research directions.

Main Methods:

• Review of comparative cognition studies, including non-human primates, corvids, and cephalopods.
• Analysis of psychological, linguistic, and anthropological research on time perception and memory.
• Evaluation of evidence on the impact of temporal technologies on human cognition.

Main Results:

• Comparative cognition suggests temporal abilities may have evolved convergently across diverse species, challenging human uniqueness.
• Language, culture, and social structures significantly tune temporal representations and usage.
• Externalizing technologies can alter behavior by interacting with internal time construction.
• Memory is adaptively biased towards future-oriented construction rather than precise recall.

Conclusions:

• Elements of temporal cognition likely emerge from convergent evolutionary pressures.
• Human temporal cognition is shaped by language, culture, social organization, and externalizing technologies.
• Transpersonal extended mental time travel, supported by shared representations, facilitates future coordination across individuals and generations.