John Cohen and the psychology of time

John Wearden

The article discusses the writings on time psychology by John Cohen, Professor of Psychology at Manchester
University between 1951 and 1979. His principal empirical contribution was the popularisation of the
kappa effect, which showed that time judgements were influenced by spatial distance, which he found
both in laboratory experiments and in studies in real-life settings. Cohen also wrote extensively about
many aspects of the psychology of time, with emphases on time in literature, and time in myth. John
Cohen exemplifies an academic who crossed with great facility between C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’, with
rigorous laboratory studies in experimental psychology being contrasted with writings based on his extensive
knowledge of the Classics and Arts.
Keywords: Time perception; kappa effect; tau effect; time in literature; time in myth.

J
OHN COHEN (1911–1985) was only
the second Professor of Psychology at
Manchester University, holding the posi-
tion from 1951 until 1979 in succession to
T.H. Pear, Britain’s first full-time Professor of
Psychology. Prior to that, Cohen had been
a Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Univer-
sity and at Birkbeck College, London, and
an Associate Professor of Psychology at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received
his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from University
College, London, but also conducted post-
graduate research at Oxford. From 1941 to
1948 he worked in the office of the War
Cabinet and the Central Statistical Office.
The expertise that he acquired in these
roles during and after the Second World
War led to his participation in the Wood
Committee on the recruitment and training
of nurses in 1945–1946. Cohen disagreed
with the approach taken by the committee,
regarding it as being insufficiently informed
by data and statistics, and lacking any links
to other aspects of health care. He produced
a minority report (Cohen, 1948), described
by Hatchett (2005) as ‘one of the most radical
critiques of the failings of workforce policy
and healthcare planning during the period’
and ‘…a salutary reminder of the inade-
quacies [of] planning within the nursing
occupation’ (pp.19 and 42). During the war
years Cohen served on an expert committee
concerned with the work of psychologists
and psychiatrists in the armed services, and
in 1948 was the technical secretary of the
International Congress on Mental Health.
In Psychology, John Cohen’s main
research interests were psychological prob-
ability (see Cohen, 1972, for a summary of
his work) and time perception, and it is the
latter that is the subject of this article. In
spite of the fact that most of his research
was focussed on these rather unusual topics,
Cohen should not be viewed as an isolated
eccentric, being both a Fellow of the British
Psychological Society and sometime member
of its Council, as well as the author of many
publications in mainstream psychology and
scientific journals.
Up until Cohen’s research which began
in the 1950s, interest in time perception
in British psychology had been sparse and
sporadic, although one well-known figure,
Beatrice Edgell, published an early article
on the topic (Edgell, 1903, see Wearden,
in press, for a discussion of Edgell’s work).
Cohen produced a short book on psycho-
logical time (Cohen, 1967), and a number
of articles and book chapters on the subject,
by far the largest body of work on time
perception by any British psychologist until
the 1990s. He had a wide range of interests
within the topic of time psychology, as will be
seen later in this article. Pullan and Abend-
stern (2004) quote from a farewell eulogy
for Cohen where it was said that he was ‘an

4 History & Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 22 No. 1


experimental psychologist who writes like
a classical scholar’ (p.60). These two sides
of Cohen’s work, experimental research and
scholarship, although not of an exclusively
classical sort, are explored below.
C.P. Snow (1959) lamented the
well-known division of British academic life
into ‘Two Cultures’: one based on science,
and the other on arts, with practitioners
of one culture exhibiting almost total igno-
rance of the other. This division was certainly
not true of Cohen’s work, particularly his
research on time, where he readily crossed
over from one to the other, but this also
applied to his approach to psychology
more generally. For example, even in a very
early publication, Cohen (1952), originally
submitted in 1950 when he worked at Birk-
beck College, he included references to
Proust and Balzac in a discussion of percep-
tion using different senses. In addition, he
clearly signalled his position by giving his
book Homo Psychologicus (Cohen, 1970) the
subtitle ‘Bridging the Arts and Sciences by
a study of Man as worker player and idler’.
Where did Cohen’s literary leanings
come from? He was born in the Welsh town
of Tredegar, and was one of nine siblings
in a prominent Jewish family. His brother
Moses (or Moshe) was a well-known rabbi,
and Moshe’s obituary, in The Light magazine
in 1975, describes his ‘broad erudition in
general culture and literature’, so it seems
likely that Cohen also shared this strong
cultural background from a young age.
As well as being known for his academic
work, Cohen was an early example of a
‘television psychologist’ and was familiar to
viewers in the North-West of England in the
1960s and 1970s. His pronouncements on
a range of very diverse topics were often
delivered from behind a cloud of smoke
produced by his pipe, something which was
possible on television in those days.
In the remainder of this article, I discuss
Cohen’s work on time from the perspec-
tive of the two different ‘cultures’ identi-
fied by Snow (1959). First, I will discuss his
research in the experimental psychology of
History & Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 22 No. 1 5
John Cohen and the psychology of time
time perception, then later his writings on
time in literature and myth.
Cohen the experimental psychologist
Of his experimental studies, perhaps the
best known is the rediscovery of what he
called the kappa effect (Cohen, Hansel &
Sylvester, 1953). As Cohen later acknowl-
edged, this had actually first been discov-
ered by a Japanese psychologist, Abe, in the
1930s, but there is no doubt that Cohen
et al.’s work brought the phenomenon to
the attention of Western psychologists. The
kappa effect was in some ways the reverse of
the tau effect described by Helson and King
(1931). The tau effect arises when three
points on the skin are successively stimu-
lated. If the time between two of these stimu-
lations is longer than the time between the
other two, then the distance between them is
judged as longer, even though it may be the
same or shorter.
Cohen et al. (1953) presented observers
with three spatially separated light flashes in
a horizontal array, and varied the distance
between the pairs, over ratios of from 1:10 to
10:1. The observer was instructed to adjust
the time between the flashes to make the
time between the first and second the same
as between the second and the third. In
Cohen et al.’s own words ‘the observer…
makes the time interval between the two
flashes spaced farther apart shorter than
the time interval between two flashes closer
together’ (p.901). In the case where the
times between the flashes are actually equal,
this results in the time between the flashes
occurring over the longer spatial distance
being judged as longer. Some results are
shown in Figure 1.
If the distances between flashes 1 and
2 and 2 and 3 are d1 and d2, and the corre-
sponding times t1 and t2, the percentage
difference needed to make the times subjec-
tively equal can be given by (t1 – t2)/t1 X 100.
Figure 1 shows that when d2>d1 then some
quantity needs to be added to t2 to make the
times subjectively equal, whereas when d1 >
d2 some quantity needs to be subtracted.
John Wearden

Figure 1: Data from Cohen et al. (1953). Percentage difference in time judgements as a function of
the ratio of the distance between the first and second, and second and third, light flashes. Data are
shown separately for the cases where the second distance was greater than the first (d2 > d1) and the
reverse case.

Cohen, Hansel, and Sylvester (1955)
replicated the kappa effect with horizontal
distance, and showed that it occurred for
vertical distance as well. Later research gener-
ally replicated the kappa effect when the phys-
ical distance between stimuli varied, although
it was not always found when the time inter-
vals between the stimuli were very short (see
Huang & Jones, 1982, for discussion).
But does the kappa effect occur when
the ‘distance’ between successive stimuli
is not spatial, for example, does it apply
when differences in pitch of successive audi-
tory stimuli are arranged? Cohen, Hansel
and Sylvester (1954a) examined potential
tau and kappa effects with pitch. In the tau
study, three successive brief auditory stimuli
of different pitch were presented, and the
participant’s task was to adjust the pitch of
the second stimulus so that it was equidistant
in pitch from the first and the third. The time
between the first and second, and second and
third, stimuli was varied. A marked tau-type
effect was found: if the first two pitches were
closer together in time than the second two,
then the pitch midpoint was changed so that
the shorter first interval resulted in a higher
pitch midpoint.
Cohen et al. then attempted a kappa
equivalent, where the times between the
stimuli were varied with the pitches them-
selves constant, but little effect was obtained.
In fact, some later studies did report an audi-
tory kappa effect but, consistent with Cohen
et al.’s work, this effect appears more fragile
than the tau effect and is not always found.
However, some later workers obtained clear
effects, e.g. Shigeno (1986) who found kappa
effects with both pure tones and synthetic
vowel sounds.
Cohen and Cooper (1962) found tau
and kappa-like effects in situations involving
real movement. Small groups of people were
transported in a blacked-out bus, so they
could not observe the environment outside.
Half-way through the trip a bell was sounded.
After the bell sounded, the bus either went
faster, went slower, or went at the same speed
as before the bell. If the bell rang at the
exact temporal mid-point of the trip, ‘that
part will seem to last longer in which the
distance and speed are greater’ (p.1234),
what they called the kappa-movement effect.
There was also a tau-movement effect, where,
if the distance traversed before and after the
bell was actually the same, the distance that

6 History & Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 22 No. 1


took the longer time was judged as longer.
In addition ‘…if two parts are travelled at
the same speed that part will seem faster in
which the distance and time are shorter’,
referred to as the kappa-tau effect.
Cohen, Cooper and Ono (1963)
conducted another ‘real life’ experiment
investigating interactions between time,
distance, and speed. Schoolchildren between
16 and 18 years of age had to walk or run
along with an experimenter. The different
conditions involved walking then running, or
the reverse, and two control conditions where
the children always walked or always ran. The
basic overall result was a small tendency for
the distance that took the longer time to be
judged as longer, but this concealed indi-
vidual differences between what Cohen et al.
called ‘tortoises’ and ‘hares’. Tortoises were
said to be especially sensitive to the passage
of time, thus judged temporally longer trips
as involving greater distances. Hares, on the
other hand, focused on speed, and gave
longer distance estimates for shorter times.
Cohen, Hansel and Sylvester (1954b)
reported a quite different sort of experi-
ment where groups of children, students,
and older adults were required to make rela-
tive judgements of long times. The scale
used involved a 10-inch (25.4cm) line length
representing the time from birth to ‘now’
(so this scale changed depending how
old the participants were), then distances
corresponding to different lengths of time,
ranging from one day to 35 years, had to be
judged, using the same scale. The lengths of
time estimated depended to some degree
on the age of the participants, so younger
participants were never asked to judge times
longer than their lifespan, for example. The
results suggested that the estimated length
of time increased logarithmically with real
duration up until about six months, then
linearly afterwards. Cohen et al. suggested
that there were two different sorts of judge-
ments, one based on some sort of lived expe-
rience, up until six months, then afterwards
dependent on calculations based on knowl-
edge of the calendar.
History & Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 22 No. 1 7
John Cohen and the psychology of time
Cohen’s interest in the experimental
Psychology of time also extended to reviews
of the early history of the subject (see Cohen,
1967, chapters 1 and 2, for example). Here,
he briefly discusses the 19th century work
of the physicist Mach, a favourite of his
mentioned in several articles, as well as that of
the psychologist Meumann (for some exam-
ples of Meumann’s work see Wearden and
Ogden, in press). He also discussed early ideas
that people might possess an ‘internal clock’.
Cohen mentions in particular the article by
François (1927) on body temperature and
judgements of time, conducted under the
auspices of the French psychologist Piéron.
In chapter 7 of his 1967 book, Cohen
proposed some modifications of the
well-known Treisman pacemaker-counter
model of time perception (Treisman,
1963). A full discussion of this model and
Cohen’s own ideas about it, is beyond the
scope of the present article, but one of
Cohen’s suggestion is of particular interest.
An important aspect of Treisman’s model is
a pacemaker, pulses from which are accumu-
lated in a counter, thus providing the ‘raw
material’ for time judgements. From one
trial to another the rate of the pacemaker can
vary, and Cohen suggests that ‘the variability
[is] due to the effect of other experiences
undergone at the same time’ as the timing
task to hand. This suggests an ‘attentional’
modification of Treisman’s model, rather
similar to the ‘attentional gate’ proposal
advanced nearly 30 years later by Zakay and
Block (1995), although Cohen situates his
attention-based ‘calibration monitor’ before
the pacemaker rather than after it as in
the attentional gate model. Unfortunately,
Cohen never developed his suggestions into
any formal theoretical model and, in fact,
published no further work on the experi-
mental psychology of time perception after
the appearance of his book in 1967.
Cohen the [sometimes classical] scholar
In addition to his experimental work on time
and his 1967 book, Cohen produced two
book chapters (Cohen, 1958, and Cohen,
John Wearden
1970) an early article (Cohen, 1954), and two
popular accounts (Cohen, 1957 and 1964),
all reviewing aspects of the psychology of
time. These writings share a lot of common
content, with the kappa effect mentioned in
almost all of them.
Cohen had particular interests in the
relation between literature and time (and his
literary interests were broader than just in
time, there is a whole chapter on ‘Psychology
and literature’ in Cohen, 1970), and time
in myth. As these are unusual topics in time
perception research these days, I will discuss
some of his writings on these issues, starting
with his views on literature and time.
As mentioned earlier, Cohen never had
problems bridging Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’. In
Cohen (1970, p.104), he writes, ‘…academic
psychologists, fearful lest their self-image as
scientists will be tarnished, feel uneasy if,
in the midst of a technical discussion, the
reader’s mind is directed to literature or the
arts’. Cohen had no such qualms, and he
often used literary examples such as illus-
trating effects of drugs on time perception
by a reference to Quincey’s Confessions of an
Opium Eater or Walter de la Mare’s account
of a friend’s experience with mescalin (e.g.
Cohen, 1958, pp.108–109, but repeated in
Cohen, 1967, pp.64–65) rather than a piece
of psychopharmacological research.
In the 1970 chapter on time, Cohen
quotes extensively from various writers, but
then, rather disarmingly, comments, ‘These
passages are not cited to prove anything but
to illustrate the limited and impoverished
conception of psychological time which
would confine it to the study of apparent
duration’ (Cohen, 1970, p.105).
It is true that in Cohen’s time what
research there was on time perception
was focussed mostly on the perception of
duration, often involving times too short
to make counting possible, and this is true
to a large extent even today. However, the
focus has widened somewhat in recent
years and now even includes work on more
‘subjective’ aspects of time perception, such
as the neglected topic of what Wearden
8 History & Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 22 No. 1
(2015) calls ‘passage of time judgements’,
that is, the feeling of the ‘speed’ at which
time seems to pass in some situation. While
experimental psychologists have only fairly
recently become interested in this, there is
an older literature (e.g. Flaherty, 1993) on
what sociologists usually called ‘temporality’.
Another somewhat similar focus of recent
interest has been research on the common
assertion that time appears to pass more
quickly as people age, something that Cohen
mentions in several of his publications. This
is a result that has been more difficult to find
in modern empirical studies than might be
supposed, given its wide popular currency
(see Wittman & Lehnhoff, 2005, for an
early study, and Droit-Volet et al., 2021, for
a recent one).
Whatever Cohen’s literary examples were
intended to prove, the relation of literature
and the psychology of time was certainly one
of his preoccupations, so in Cohen (1967,
p.34) we have an example from Turgenev
of the apparent slowness of the passage of
time, and in Cohen (1970, pp.104–105) he
provides quotes from Leonardo da Vinci,
Nietzsche, Proust and Valery, all illustrating
the complexity of time experience. In Cohen
(1967, pp.74–75) he classifies writers in
terms of the way that time is depicted in
their work. One example of ‘slow motion’
time is from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where
the first two minutes of the protagonist’s life
take much longer to read than two minutes.
Proust’s famously elongated time, his
‘motionless description’, where hundreds of
pages of text may be devoted to an event
lasting an hour or so, is also noted.
Cohen was also interested in the repre-
sentation of time in myth and religion, and
in classical Greek and Roman writing and
art. As he shows in Cohen (1967) many
religions have developed conceptions of
time quite different from that of the exper-
imental psychologist. Different times may
be regarded as sacred or profane, as in
Hesiod’s Works and Days, cited in several of
Cohen’s writing on time, where different days
are regarded as ‘propitious or unpropitious’

for different activities and ‘each period is
animated by a personal spirit’ (p.72). Cohen
also discusses the idea that time is viewed as
cyclical rather than linear in some eastern
religious systems.
Another section in Cohen (1967)
discusses how thought in antiquity appeared
to have different ‘basic images of time’.
For example, time has been ‘represented
by the figure of Opportunity’, ‘when the
time is ripe and opportune’ (p.77). Another
is exemplified by the Iranian god ‘Aion,
a symbol of divine and inexhaustible crea-
tiveness’ (p.78), associated with the cult of
Mithras. Cohen also points out other asso-
ciations with time in classical thinking, in
particular the contradiction between time
as a ‘destroyer’ of all things and, conversely,
time as representing renewal and fecundity.
He attributes this to a confusion between
Kronos (Κρόνος) and Cronos (Χρόνος).
The former was the chief of the Titans,
and the father of Zeus, among other gods,
and is generally associated with the destruc-
tive power of time. Perhaps the fact that he
castrated his father, Saturn, and swallowed
his own children (albeit not permanently)
contributed to his sinister aspect. Cronos,
in contrast, is the Greek god of time, and of
harvests, so represents the renewing aspect
of time, which in the case of harvests is of
course cyclical. The scythe associated with
‘Father Time’ in modern representations
could come from either, as a weapon in the
former case, and as an agricultural imple-
ment in the latter.
A critic might complain that it is hard
to know exactly what Cohen’s explorations
of time in literature and myth, interesting
and engagingly written as they are, actu-
ally tell us about time perception, except
that it has many complex aspects, which
hardly anyone would deny. As suggested
by the quote cited earlier, Cohen himself
also sometimes seemed rather unsure just
exactly what the message from literature was
supposed to be. In Cohen’s writings about
History & Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 22 No. 1 9
John Cohen and the psychology of time
literature and myth, the ‘classical scholar’
seemed definitely to have the upper hand
over the ‘experimental psychologist’ and,
furthermore, there is no suggestion overall
in his work that his experimental studies
were influenced by his interest in litera-
ture and the classics; the two aspects of his
research seem to have been kept completely
separate.
Conclusion
Among British psychologists of his genera-
tion John Cohen’s interest in time percep-
tion was virtually unique, and the breadth
of his interests marks him out even now.
To use a classical metaphor which seems
particularly appropriate for Cohen’s work,
in his research on time he was a Janus-like
figure, facing in two directions at once. One
direction was conventional experimental
psychology. The body of empirical work he
left is fairly small, but contains interesting
results which others have built on, and he
showed an unusual desire to extend findings
made in the laboratory to real-life settings.
His other face was directed towards literary
and classical interests. This double aspect
permeated most of Cohen’s later writings
on time, giving his publications a rather
different flavour from the mostly technical
discussions of time perception found today.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for
suggestions which have improved the organ-
ization and content of this article. Many
thanks are also due to Dr Claire Jackson
for providing information about John
Cohen’s background and education. The
preparation of the article benefitted from
resources provided by an Emeritus Fellow-
ship from the Leverhulme Trust.
John Wearden
School of Psychology, Keele University,
Keele, ST5 5BG, U.K.
j.h.wearden@keele.ac.uk
John Wearden
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