The Representation Of Temporal Information In Working Memory

The temporal information is of great importance to people's daily life. However, the representation of this kind of information remains open to discussion. One perspective suggests that the representation of temporal information is based on the representation of spatial information, such that the abstract time is constructed from the space, which is more concrete and experienced. This hypothesis has been supported by the empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology. Hence, if the representations of both temporal and spatial information in working memory were consistent, they would have similar characteristics. Further, some recent research has revealed that there is compression of space in visual working memory. Based on this finding, the present study adopted the relative interval judgment paradigm to investigate whether there is compression of empty temporal interval, which was marked by two successively presented visual stimuli, in working memory as well.The present study includes three experiments: Experiment 1 aimed to investigate the retention performance for temporal intervals, in which three levels of standard comparison were used, a standard and a comparison were successively presented with a delay between them, and the participants were required to judge which one was longer after offset of the comparison. In Experiment 2, the delay between the standard and comparison was cancelled, in order to test whether the distortion of temporal intervals observed in Experiment 1 was based on perception or memory. In Experiment 3, participants had to memorize two intervals and compare one of them with the comparison, and the aim was to investigate whether the increase in memory load would have an effect on interval retention. The main findings of the present study are as follows:(1) There is compression of empty temporal intervals which is longer than ls in working memory. This effect is consistent with what has been found for space in visual working memory. The results indicate the consistency of representations of temporal and spatial information.(2) The increase in memory load does not have an effect on the retention performance of empty temporal intervals, suggesting that the compression might not be simply caused by memory decay.