  The time-changing nature of our world demands processing of huge amounts of
information in fast and reliable way to generate successful behaviors.
Therefore, significant brain resources are devoted to process spatiotemporal
information. Neural basis of spatial processing and their cognitive correlates
are well established mostly for static environments. Nonetheless, in
time-changing situations the brain exploits specific processing mechanisms for
temporal information based on prediction and anticipation, as time compression
during visual perception and mental navigation. Alternative hypothesis of time
compaction integrates both views, postulating that dynamic situations are
internally represented as static spatial maps where temporal information is
extracted by predicting and structuring the relevant interactions.
Nevertheless, empirical approaches tackling the biological soundness of time
compaction are still lacking. Here we show that performance in a discrimination
learning task involving dynamic situations can be either favored or hampered
via previous exposition to interfering static scenes. In this sense, men were
effectively conditioned in contrast to a control group, in coherence with the
hypothesis. Meanwhile, women performed on par with control men, regardless of
the previous conditioning. This suggests time compaction is a salient cognitive
strategy in men when dealing with dynamic situations, while women seem to rely
on a broader range of information processing strategies. Finally, we further
corroborated the time compaction mechanism involved in these experimental
findings through a mathematical model of the experimental process. Our results
point to some form of static internal representation mechanism at cognitive
level involved in decision-making and strategy planning in dynamic situations
[...]
