Opinion
Temporal Junctures in the Mind

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.10.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Many recent studies have examined the development, evolution, dysfunctions, and neurocognitive mechanisms of the capacity to consider events from alternative timelines.

  • Children begin to consistently prepare for alternative versions of immediate future events around 4 years of age, but do not accurately consider alternative versions of past events and present situations until around 6 years of age.

  • There is no compelling evidence that non-human animals consider and compare events from alternative timelines, although interpretations of some results remain contentious.

  • Representing alternative versions of the future enables humans to form contingency plans and otherwise compensate for their inability to perfectly predict future outcomes.

  • Representing alternative versions of the past enables humans to learn associations not only between actual behaviours and outcomes, but also counterfactual behaviours and outcomes.

Humans can imagine what happened in the past and what will happen in the future, but also what did not happen and what might happen. We reflect on envisioned events from alternative timelines, while knowing that we only ever live on one timeline. Considering alternative timelines rests on representations of temporal junctures, or points in time at which possible versions of reality diverge. These representations become increasingly sophisticated over childhood, first enabling preparation for mutually exclusive future possibilities and later the experience of counterfactual emotions like regret. By contrast, it remains unclear whether non-human animals represent temporal junctures at all. The emergence of these representations may have been a prime mover in human evolution.

Section snippets

Possible Worlds: Past, Present, and Future

[For] an intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature was composed … nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

– Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814)

A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with … a tiny bit of radioactive substance … If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still

Temporal Junctures: Live and Expired

Our perspective on temporal junctures shares some similarities with Byrne’s notion of counterfactual fault lines [30,31], or the aspects of past events that people tend to mentally adjust to create alternative versions of the present. You may, for instance, spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what the present would look like if you had stayed together with a former romantic partner, or if an alternative candidate had won a crucial election. Whereas Byrne emphasises past divergence

Children’s Representations of Temporal Junctures

In developmental psychology [36, 37, 38, 39], as in comparative psychology [40, 41, 42], the basic capacity for mental time travel is often examined using variations of the two-rooms task [36] (also known as the spoon test [43]). In brief, children are first exposed to a problem in one room, before being taken to a second room where they later have the chance to select the solution (from among distractors) to take back to the first room. Experiments with two-rooms tasks have provided strong

Why the Protracted Development? A Representational Hierarchy

It may seem counterintuitive that children appear to represent future temporal junctures around 2 years before they can represent past temporal junctures and alternative versions of the present. After all, children have direct access to the present (via perception) and indirect access to the past (via memory), and yet they can only infer the future. One potential explanation for this developmental trajectory is that envisioning past and present alternatives requires greater inhibitory control

Are Representations of Temporal Junctures Uniquely Human?

The basic ability to predict uncertain future outcomes is evolutionarily ancient [80,81], and several influential unifying theories of neuroscience posit that animal brains are essentially prediction machines [82, 83, 84, 85, 86]. Common to these theories is the notion that brains function to register and minimise prediction error in an a posteriori manner: the future is predicted, and any discrepancies between the expected and actual outcome change the parameters of subsequent predictions.

Concluding Remarks

Many complex human behaviours are underscored by representations of future temporal junctures. Recently, we proposed the term metaforesight [68] to encapsulate the overarching capacity to reflect on alternative future possibilities and optimise behaviour accordingly. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of metaforesight is contingency planning: an agent that represents mutually exclusive future possibilities can try to ‘cover all bases’ by preparing not only for likely and desirable outcomes, but

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a University of Queensland Development Fellowship (UQFEL1832633) awarded to J.R.

Glossary

Bayesian priors
data-driven inferences about the likelihood of particular uncertain outcomes occurring in the future. In cognition, Bayesian priors may be experienced as intuitions about uncertain outcomes rather than rationally derived predictions.
Causally overdetermined events
events that were in fact caused by one antecedent but would have been caused by a second antecedent in the absence of the first.
Counterfactual thinking
accurately representing how the present version of reality would look

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