ABSTRACT Time perception is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, influencing motor coordination, decision‐making, and planning. Unlike sensory modalities such as vision or hearing, which rely on dedicated sensory organs, the perception of time lacks a specific neural substrate, making it highly dependent on internal physiological and psychological states. Research suggests that physiological arousal plays a crucial role in temporal distortions, with pacemaker‐accumulator models proposing that heightened arousal accelerates the internal clock, leading to an overestimation of time. We provide a systematic review of the available literature on the complex relationship between physiological indices of arousal and time distortion. Overall while a relatively consistent association emerged between baseline cardiac autonomic activity and temporal accuracy. When physiological arousal was experimentally manipulated, its relationship with temporal distortion was substantially less consistent. These differences were observed across pain, stress, emotional, and physical‐activity paradigms and appeared to vary according to the characteristics of the eliciting stimulus. This pattern highlights the need to distinguish physiological arousal from the other cognitive processes involved and provides a basis for future research investigating also the other potential explanatory factors in the relationship between arousal and time perception.
Resilience mechanisms to counteract aging and the onset of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases are becoming an increasingly central issue due to the aging of the population. Several mechanisms have been hypothesized, and in the context of cognitive resilience, the construct of cognitive reserve has attracted considerable interest. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are several possible mechanisms of resilience (e.g., motor, affective, behavioral, etc.) which interact with each other, influencing inter-individual variability in healthy and pathological aging trajectories. However, to date, central-peripheral processes have not yet been explicitly incorporated as a resilience mechanism in models of cognitive and affective aging. This perspective article therefore aims to propose a new resilience mechanism, the "Neuroautonomic Adaptive Resilience" (NAR) that implicate a flexible and efficient integration of the central and the autonomic nervous system, allowing individuals to adapt effectively to stressors throughout their lives. This perspective proposes its theoretical framework, its operationalization, and its integration with existing concepts in the field of cognitive and affective neuroscience of aging.
Musical expertise is often associated with enhanced cognitive abilities, underpinned by neural mechanisms unique to musicians. Research has provided evidence of associations between musical training and functional aspects of cognition. However, the neural changes associated with musical expertise, particularly in relation to working memory, remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we conducted an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to examine differences in functional neural activity between musicians and non-musicians during working memory tasks. Meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) was conducted to explore broader networks of co-activation associated with regions of interest identified during the initial ALE meta-analysis. Nine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, including 228 participants (113 musicians and 115 non-musicians), were included in the final analysis. Musicians exhibited hyperactivations in the right medial frontal gyrus and hypoactivations across the right middle occipital gyrus, the right precentral gyrus, the left inferior parietal lobule, the right claustrum, and the left cerebellum during working memory tasks. MACM revealed distributed networks of co-activation with links to various cognitive functions across regions of interest uncovered by the ALE analysis. Based on these findings, we propose that distinct functional networks and enhanced neural efficiency in musicians may support working memory performance across the lifespan. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition Psychology > Development and Aging Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development.
Collective memory in humans refers to individual memories that become shared within a community and contribute to social identity, coordination, and cultural continuity. Extensive research shows that collective memory emerges through language-mediated interaction, social influence, and distributed cognitive mechanisms, supporting cooperation, decision-making, and cultural transmission. While these processes are well documented in humans, it remains unclear whether, and in what sense, collective memory exists in nonhuman animals. Here we propose a systematic comparative framework for understanding collective memory across species. We first outline the cognitive foundations of collective memory in humans, highlighting the roles of episodic, semantic, autobiographical, and procedural memory, together with mechanisms such as memory conformity, social contagion, memory convergence, transactive memory systems, and ritualized practices. We then examine whether nonhuman animals possess functional precursors of these mechanisms. Across taxa, animals exhibit episodic-like and semantic-like memory, social learning, conformity, distributed information systems, and ritualized behaviors that allow groups to store, transmit, and update knowledge beyond individual capacities. These processes support stable traditions, coordinated action, and adaptive responses. Although nonhuman animals show no evidence of autonoetic consciousness or human-like autobiographical memory, we argue that collective memory should be understood as a graded, non-dichotomous phenomenon grounded in distributed cognition.
Research on memory and the physical environment has expanded across neuroscience, environmental psychology, and spatial cognition. Yet the literature remains conceptually diverse. A central reason is that the term environment is used to refer to different kinds of phenomena across traditions. In some studies, environment is treated as a broad category, such as natural versus urban. In others, it is defined through spatial and perceptual features, such as landmarks or space geometry. It is also understood as a contextual or event-related structure that becomes bound to experience and later supports retrieval. These approaches are often discussed separately, even when they address overlapping questions about memory. This review organizes the field into three broad traditions: category-based, feature-based, and context-based accounts. We show how each tradition foregrounds different environmental properties, memory systems, and mechanisms. Category-based work most often links environment to attention and working memory, feature-based work to navigation and spatial representation, and context-based work to episodic encoding and retrieval. By placing these traditions side by side, the review clarifies how the environment has been conceptualized in memory research and how different assumptions about environment shape the questions asked, the methods used, and the kinds of memory effects that become visible. The review further proposes that environment can be understood as contributing to memory in at least three roles: as structure, as navigational scaffold, and as cue. Together, these distinctions provide a structured account of a diverse field and identify directions for future work on the relationship between environment and memory.
