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29 Time in the Psychopathological Mind Melissa J. Allman, Bin Yin, and Warren H. Meck Man is apparently almost unique in being able to talk about things that are remote in space or time (or both) from where the talking goes on. —Charles Hockett, “The Origin of Speech” What does “time” mean to you? Think about the Grand Canyon for a moment: try to imagine millions of years of erosion by the Colorado River, revealing billions of years of the Earth’s geological history. It’s hard to imagine all of that time. Time itself can bestow historical beauty and appeal, and like other aspects of psychophysics and perception, controls much of our interactions with events in our internal and external lives. We typically think about the consequences of our actions in hypothetical time, and these temporal dynamics influence our valuations of future rewards and past experience. It’s as if the temporal sequence of events that we experience courses through our lives like a river, honing the rhythmical structure of our earliest social interactions and emotions (Eagleman & Pariyadath, 2009; Droit-Volet & Meck, 2007; Droit-Volet et al., 2007; Fortin et al., 2009; Gu & Meck, 2011; Jaffe et al., 2001; Meck & MacDonald, 2007; Stetson et al., 2007); our perception and production of speech (Kotz & Schwartze, 2010; Schirmer, 2004); the coding of memories (Brown et al., 2007; Malapani et al., 1998; Meck, 2002); as well as our ability for mental time travel—that is, contemplation of the past, present, and future (Boyer, 2008; Nyberg et al., 2010; Suddendorf et al., 2009; Wearden, 2002). At a more basic level, our ability to estimate absolute and relative durations on different timescales allows us to anticipate , learn, and adapt to temporal regularities and dynamics in the social and nonsocial environment (Hinton & Meck, 1997b; Agostino et al., 2011; Buhusi & Meck, 2005, 2009a, b). The question of how internal, subjective time corresponds to external, objective time is commonly assessed by psychophysical procedures that quantify how an internal sensory experience scales with an external stimulus. Indeed, such timing processes (e.g., prospective time estimation) have been argued to play an important role in multisensory integration and the monitoring of cognitive behavior (e.g., Holmes & Spence, 2005; Meck, 2002, 2003, 2005; Meck & Benson, 2002; van Wassenhove, 2009). If we are indeed all marionettes on this earth, time is surely one of the strings, and its accompanying patina shows how we have been shaped by the past. 638 Melissa J. Allman, Bin Yin, and Warren H. Meck Time, space, and number are fundamental dimensions of the world in which we live that have been incorporated into the brains and behaviors of virtually all species (Gallistel, 1990; Meck, 2003; Walsh, 2003). Interval timing, which refers to the ability to measure durations in the seconds-to-minutes range, has been intensively studied, both in humans (e.g., Brannon et al., 2008; Droit-Volet & Wearden, 2001; Rakitin et al., 1998) and other animals (e.g., Bateson & Kacelnik, 1997; Boisvert & Sherry, 2006; Brodbeck et al., 1998; Cheng et al., 2011; Roberts, 1981). These studies stem from earlier work on operant and classical conditioning (Pavlov, 1927; Skinner, 1938) as well as the law of effect (Thorndike, 1933) and Michel Treisman’s “internal clock” hypothesis (Treisman 1963), and continuing with the efforts of mathematical psychologists and learning theorists (e.g., Balci et al., 2011; Gallistel & Gibbon, 2001; Gibbon and Church, 1990). More recently, the study of interval timing has entered the realm of neurobiological investigation both in humans and other animals (e.g., Coull et al., 2004, 2011; Lake & Meck, 2013; Lustig et al., 2005; Matell et al., 2003; Meck & Benson, 2002; Meck, 2006a, b, c; Merchant et al., 2013; Rao et al., 2001). However, the transition from the modeling of behavioral timing data to electrophysiological recordings and simulation of the patterns of neural firing that contribute to behavioral output has never been an easy undertaking (Matell & Meck, 2000, 2004). On the one hand, it is possible to adopt the core concepts of traditional timing models (e.g., Gibbon et al., 1984) and attempt to identify plausible brain areas and neural circuits that might satisfy the proposed information-processing stages of interval timing (Gibbon et al., 1997; Meck, 1983, 1996; Van Rijn et al., 2013—see Church & Broadbent, 1990 and Shi et al., 2013 for proposed guidelines). The major goal of such attempts would be to identify the source of the scalar property of interval timing, which states that the variability of timing behavior is proportional to the mean of the...

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