As far as the brain is concerned, these two timing tasks are fundamentally different from each other. In the first case you know in advance that you will be performing a timing task, you can start a hypothetical stopwatch at t=0, and track the passage of time until approximately five minutes have elapsed. But in the second case—where Bert asked how long ago Amy left—your stopwatch is useless because you were never told when to start it. Prospective timing is a true temporal task in that it relies on the brain’s timing circuits. In contrast, retrospective timing is in a sense not a timing task
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