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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

examining literature. My hope is to point to ways of furthering a re-
search program in the psychology of space and time, a program that
is behavioral, neuroscientific, cognitive-affective, and literary.
The neuroscience of space and time is to a great extent domi-
nated by the information-processing aspects of space and time psy-
chology. Controlled laboratory studies are designed, quite rightly, to
isolate single factors in spatial or temporal processing. This isolation
typically focusses on how the research subjects come to a basic un-
derstanding of space or time. That may involve motivation, of course.
But it typically does so in only very limited ways. For example, in his
important book, Mind Time, Benjamin Libet worries that “the conver-
sion and transmission of an experience into a report may involve
some distortion.” However, he continues, “it is possible to limit the
kinds of experiences being studied to very simple ones that do not
have emotional content.” In consequence, he designed his studies to
involve only “experiences that had no emotional aspects” (10). Other
researchers do not always exclude emotion; however, even when
emotion or motivation is considered, it is usually not the topic of focal
interest.
As writers in, for example, situated cognition theory have
stressed, such research often appears to fail in ecological validity. In
real life, our experience of space and time is complex. Moreover, it
is inseparable from multiple, changing emotions, as well as social
norms and practices interconnected with those emotions. To take up
the mantra of situated cognition, our practical activities—spatial,
temporal, and so on—are embedded, embodied, and distributed (see
1
Robbins and Aydede). In other words, our relation to space and
time is located in an encompassing, richly varied, subtly and grossly
changing world (thus, embedded); it is something we experience not
only in abstract imagination, but in our continual, varying, bodily
experience and action (thus, embodied); and it is integrated with the
experiences, actions, and environments of others, both directly and
indirectly (thus, distributed).

1 A useful treatment of distributed cognition by Michael Wheeler
may be found at the “History of Distributed Cognition” website
(h p://www.hdc.ed.ac.uk/seminars/distributed-cognition-analytic-and-con-
tinental-traditions [accessed November 20, 2017]).

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