Experiencing and Processing Time with Neural Networks

Abstract—The sense of time is directly involved in most of the daily activities of humans and animals. However, the cognitive mechanisms that support experiencing and processing time remain unknown, with the assumption of the clock-like tick accumulation dominating the field. The present work aims to explore whether temporal cognition may be developed without the use of clock-like mechanisms. We evolve ordinary neural network structures that (i) monitor the length of two time intervals, (ii) compare their durations and (iii) express different behaviors depending on whether the first or the second duration was larger. We study the mechanisms self-organized internally in the network and we compare them with leading hypothesis in brain science, showing that tick-accumulation may not be a prerequisite for experiencing and processing time. Keywords-time perception, temporal cognition, brain-inspired cognition, robotic system I