HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Reason and Decision-Making
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2025.1611855
A framework for uniting space and time in the mind and brain
Provisionally accepted
- University of Oregon, Eugene, United States
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Kant argued that all experience is perceived through the lens of a priori concepts of space and time. That is, Kantian philosophy supposes that knowledge is formatted in terms of space and time. The current paper argues that space can be reduced to time and thus that the only a priori concept used to format knowledge is time. To build this framework, the current paper focuses on how humans discount time when making intertemporal choices. Celebrated temporal discounting models, such as the exponential and hyperbolic discounting models, are reviewed before arguing in favor of a more ecologically motivated account that suggests that hyperbolic discounting emerges from exponential discounting and uncertainty. The ecological account of temporal discounting is then applied to spatial navigation. Along the way, findings from neurobiology and principles from computational mechanisms are used to substantiate claims. Reducing space to time has important implications in cognitive science and philosophy and can inform a suite of seemingly distinct literatures.
Keywords: temporal discounting, successor representation, exploration-exploitation, cognitive representation, decision-making
Received: 14 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Houser. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Troy M. Houser, University of Oregon, Eugene, United States
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