ABSTRACT
Temporal processing is an integral component of many everyday goal-oriented behaviors. One need look no further than the processes involved in cooking an evening meal to see the importance of accurate timing. Efficient planning of task sequence is determined to a large degree by how long each task will take, such as the time required for butter to melt or water to boil. To increase efficiency, one might schedule a series of shorter, timed tasks to take place while waiting for a longer task to come to completion. Thus, one often must keep track of multiple intervals simultaneously. If distracted by a telephone call at a critical juncture, we may “lose track of time,” and have to estimate how much time has elapsed and act accordingly. In such situations, we often turn to external timekeeping devices, such as timers and watches. However, we are not wholly dependent on them. People are capable of measuring time with a degree of accuracy that implies the presence of specific cognitive components for temporal processing. In this chapter, we outline the cognitive models that have been used to understand temporal cognition in humans. We then discuss how these theories have shaped the investigation of temporal processing disorders in neurology patients with neurological disorders, as well as how the resulting neurological data have constrained and modified our cognitive theories.
