Temporal Understanding under Deictic Frame of Reference

Abstract: Understanding time is fundamental to human cognition, where temporal experience is often conceptualized through spatial metaphors grounded in sensory-motor experience. For example, "summer is approaching" parallels "We are approaching the summer". In such expressions, humans rely on a frame of reference (FoR) to interpret meaning relative to a particular viewpoint. Extending this concept to time, a temporal frame of reference (t-FoR) defines how temporal relations are perceived relative to an experiencer's moment of "now". While LLMs have shown remarkable advances in natural language understanding, their ability to interpret and reason about time remains limited. In this work, we introduce TUuD (Temporal Understanding under Deictic t-FoR), a framework that evaluates how LLMs interpret time-event and event-event relations when the reference point of "now" dynamically shifts along a timeline. Following recent work on temporal cognition \cite{li2025other}, LLMs are prompted to rate the similarity between the current moment and a target event from 0.00 (completely dissimilar) to 1.00 (highly similar), where similarity quantifies perceived temporal alignment between the two points. Our results show that four evaluated LLMs exhibit measurable adaptation to a deictic t-FoR, with similarity ratings peaking around the present and decreasing toward past and future events. The adaptation, however, weakens beyond near-term contexts, suggesting that while LLMs display partial human-like temporal cognition, their temporal reasoning remains sensitive to reference-frame shifts and temporal distance.