Book excerpt: Humans manifest an acute awareness of the passage of time and capacity for mental time travel, i.e., the ability to mentally place oneself in the past or future, as well as in counterfactual or hypothetical situations. The ability to perceive, estimate, and keep track of time involves multiple forms of representation (temporal concepts and frames of reference) and sensory modalities. Temporal cognition plays a critical role in various forms of memory (e.g., autobiographical memory, episodic memory, prospective memory), future-oriented thinking (foresight, planning), self-concepts, and autonoetic consciousness. This Research Topic addresses the myriad ways that temporal cognition impacts human behavior, how it develops, its clinical relevance, and the extent to which aspects of temporal cognition are uniquely human. Papers in this Research Topic focus on the following: 1) Low-level perceptual mechanisms that track durations, intervals, and other temporal features of stimuli. 2) Inter-relatedness of temporal reasoning and language development. 3) Temporal cognition in children with autism. 4) Cross-domain mappings between space and time across visual and auditory modalities. 5) Assessing mental time travel as a uniquely human capacity. 6) Implications of individual differences in temporal processing for health and well-being.