Ed Riemann: It's About Time!

Your essay and comments about time lost me but will come back again and again; thanks for the ideas.

You might check some of S.S. Stevens work with magnitude estimation in psychophysics paradigms. There are probably some data showing that we Occidental, college student types estimate time by some log function of linear time, that we probably don't vary a whole lot from each other in some ways, and that we each have our own error characteristics such that we are more consistent with ourselves than with each other.

Another approach is taken lately by Russ Barkley (Taking charge of ADHD, Guilford, 1996, about $17). He reasons that impulsive children spend less time thinking about their behavior or experiences. The kids are too busy "doing" things to stop and reflect or to "self-talk" about their activity. Consequently, they have some memory impairments (recalling fewer details and in a temporally scrambled sequence), a diminished sense of time, a diminished sense of themselves, and a lessened ability to plan. The data are starting to appear. He comments that impulsive children make fewer references to future or past activities than average children when talking to parents. Impulsive children tend to estimate a linear minute as really being longer than stated by the clock. There's a neat paper (It's about time, ADHD Report, December 1994, pp. 1-2) that describes Barkley's initial data and the relevance of such findings to impulsive behavior.

• Time on My Hands by Ed Riemann, 3/30/97
  • Thoughtful Approach! by James Brody, 4/3/97