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Cognitively controlled timing and executive functions develop in parallel? A glimpse on childhood research

C. Vicario

Published 2013 in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

ABSTRACT

Accurate temporal estimations are essential in order to face the surrounding variety of everyday situations (Vicario et al., 2013a). Executive functions (EF) seem strongly involved in timing ability, allowing us to codify temporal intervals, reproduce durations and/or re-call them after a previous encoding phase. In particular, time processing abilities seem related to three different domains of our EF such as working memory (WM) (Fortin and Breton, 1995; Fortin and Rousseau, 1998; Mangels et al., 1998; Lewis and Miall, 2006) attention (Rose and Summers, 1995; Casini and Ivry, 1999; Enns et al., 1999; Tse et al., 2004; Brown, 2006; Vicario et al., 2007, 2009, 2011a,b; Vicario, 2011), and impulsivity control (Reynolds and Schiffbauer, 2004; Wittmann and Paulus, 2008; Rubia et al., 2009). The evidence in support of these relationship is provided not only by the empirical demonstration that the interference with the processing of one of these three EF affects timing performance (e.g., patients with attention or WM deficits are less accurate in time keeping functions. For instance see the works of Casini and Ivry (1999) and Mangels et al. (1998) on patients with prefrontal lesions) but also in theoretical models which explain how the brain keeps memory of time. For example, the pacemaker–accumulator model (Buhusi and Meck, 2009), assumes that the human brain has its own internal clock with a pacemaker producing subjective time units (Zakay and Block, 1997). Wittmann and Paulus (2008) argue a possible influence of impulsivity on the subjective time keeping functions. In fact, it has been suggested that impulsivity might influence the pacemaker rate of this internal clock and therefore the number of accumulated pulses for temporal units (see Wittmann and Paulus, 2008 for a review on the argument). In this article I expand upon this idea by providing evidence in support of the suggestion that the ability in performing cognitively controlled timing tasks develop in parallel with these three domains of the EF. This hypothesis basically stems from two arguments: (i) The evidence of a close relationship, in childhood populations, between temporal accuracy and the performance in tasks involving WM, attention and impulsivity control; (ii) The evidence of age related functional differences comparing the activity of the prefrontal cortex during the execution of timing as well as WM, attentive and impulsivity control tasks. The implications behind this hypothesis are intriguing because they may help to clarify, through the study of cognitive development models, the relationship between the development of the EF and the progression of the level of sophistication of time keeping skills. Moreover, the study of the time keeping functions in childhood populations could represent a potential element of evaluation to qualitatively determine and/or monitor the EF development during the critical phases of brain growth. Finally, one advantage in charting the developmental trajectory of time processing and EF at certain critical moments of development is that this can help to differentiate between experience-dependent versus inborn aspects of time and EF.

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