Future versus present: Time perspective and pupillary response in a relatedness judgment task investigating temporal event knowledge

Mental representations of events contain many components such as typical agents, instruments, objects as well as a temporal dimension that is directed towards the future. While the role of temporal orientation (chronological, reverse) in event knowledge has been demonstrated by numerous studies, little is known about the influence of time perspective (present or future) as source of individual differences affecting event knowledge. The present study combined behavioral data with task-evoked pupil dilation to examine the impact of time perspective on cognitive resource allocation. In a relatedness judgment task, everyday events like raining were paired with an object feature like wet. Chronological items were processed more easily than reverse items regardless of time perspective. When more automatic processes were applied, greater scores on future time perspective were associated with lower error rates for chronological items. This suggests that a match between a strong focus on future consequences and items with a temporal orientation directed toward the future serves to enhance responding accuracy. Indexed by pupillary data, future-oriented participants invested more cognitive resources while outperforming present-oriented participants in reaction times across all conditions. This result was supported by a principal component analysis on the pupil data, which demonstrated the same impact of time perspective on the factor associated with more general aspects of cognitive effort. These findings suggest that future time perspective may be linked to a more general cognitive performance characteristic that improves overall task performance.

► The impact of time perspective on temporal event knowledge was examined.
► Future-oriented participants responded faster than present-oriented participants.
► Future time perspective was linked to the allocation of more cognitive resources.
► This finding was supported by a PCA on pupil data.
► Future time perspective appears to improve overall task performance.