Bill Friedman

Department of Psychology, Oberlin College, Ohio, USA

The Construction of Time

Humans' experience of time is the product of many processes, and neuroscience, the study of the abilities of animals, and developmental psychology can all play key roles in understanding their bases. After a brief summary of research on animal abilities and brain mechanisms, I will focus on developmental approaches. I will argue that humans' adaptation to time is largely a matter of the development of representations of recurrent time patterns, varying in scale from the brief to the very lengthy. I will summarise research on this development, with particular attention to recent findings on infants' sensitivity to temporally unidirectional events — arrows of time.

This page was last updated on 16 Feb 2001.

Back.