The aim of the present review article is to guide the reader through portions of the human time perception, or temporal processing, literature. After distinguishing the main contemporary issues related to time perception, the article focuses on the main findings and explanations that are available in the literature on explicit judgments about temporal intervals. The review emphasizes studies that are concerned with the processing of intervals lasting a few milliseconds to several seconds and covers studies issuing from either a behavioral or a neuroscience approach. It also discusses the question of whether there is an internal clock (pacemaker counter or oscillator device) that is dedicated to temporal processing and reports the main hypotheses regarding the involvement of biological structures in time perception.

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Timing and time perception: A review of recent behavioral and neuroscience findings and theoretical directions

Suppose someone had to prepare a review article on visual perception, instead of time perception. This individual would probably ask for a series of reviews, with at least one—and probably several—dedicated to color, distance, shape, and motion perception, and maybe to other aspects of visual perception. It would be very difficult to complete the same exercise for time perception since the categories of temporal experiences are not as clearly defined. However, for a reader to understand the scope of a text on time perception, it is essential to develop a representation of what the main research avenues or categories are. The present text should help the reader to grasp the scope of recent literature related to psychological time and time perception. After a brief overview of the various perspectives on what could be meant by psychological time, the review will propose to identify of series of key concepts and empirical findings that should delineate the field of time perception and timing, and will discuss some models of time perception. The article also provides a review of the main recent findings in the field in which a neuroscientific approach to timing is adopted. In this section, the roles of the cerebellum, of the cerebral cortices, and of the basal ganglia in the timing processes are emphasized. Time Perception Beyond the Focus of the Present Review

TUTORIAL REVIEW Timing and time perception: A review of recent behavioral and neuroscience findings and theoretical directions

When time is space: evidence for a mental time line.

Time is a universal psychological dimension, but time perception has often been studied and discussed in relative isolation. Increasingly, researchers are searching for unifying principles and integrated models that link time perception to other domains. In this review, we survey the links between temporal cognition and other psychological processes. Specifically, we describe how subjective duration is affected by nontemporal stimulus properties (perception), the allocation of processing resources (attention), and past experience with the stimulus (memory). We show that many of these connections instantiate a "processing principle," according to which perceived time is positively related to perceptual vividity and the ease of extracting information from the stimulus. This empirical generalization generates testable predictions and provides a starting-point for integrated theoretical frameworks. By outlining some of the links between temporal cognition and other domains, and by providing a unifying principle for understanding these effects, we hope to encourage time-perception researchers to situate their work within broader theoretical frameworks, and that researchers from other fields will be inspired to apply their insights, techniques, and theorizing to improve our understanding of the representation and judgment of time. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Temporal cognition: Connecting subjective time to perception, attention, and memory.

Perceived duration is conventionally assumed to correspond with objective duration, but a growing literature suggests a more complex picture. For example, repeated stimuli appear briefer in duration than a novel stimulus of equal physical duration. We suggest that such duration illusions appear to parallel the neural phenomenon of repetition suppression, and we marshal evidence for a new hypothesis: the experience of duration is a signature of the amount of energy expended in representing a stimulus, i.e. the coding efficiency. This novel hypothesis offers a unified explanation for almost a dozen illusions in the literature in which subjective duration is modulated by properties of the stimulus such as size, brightness, motion and rate of flicker.

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Is subjective duration a signature of coding efficiency

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan The perception of time spent looking at a stimulus is lengthened or shortened when its physical attributes, such as area, differ from those of a comparison stimulus. We measured the perceived presentation duration of a visual object whose apparent area was altered by the Ebbinghaus illusion while its physical size remained invariant, so that a central circle surrounded by larger inducers appeared smaller than a same-size central circle surrounded by smaller inducers. The results showed that the perceived duration of presentation for apparently larger circles was longer than that of apparently smaller circles, although the actual area remained invariant across all circles. We concluded that the time perception process receives input from later visual processing.

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The subjective size of visual stimuli affects the perceived duration of their presentation.

Cultural Differences in Perception and Attitude towards Robots

Contextual cuing refers to the facilitation of performance in visual search due to the repetition of the same displays. Whereas previous studies have focused on contextual cuing within single-search trials, this study tested whether 1 trial facilitates visual search of the next trial. Participants searched for a T among Ls. In the training phase, the spatial layout on trial N1 was predictive of the target location on trial N. In the testing phase, the predictive value was removed. Results revealed an intertrial temporal contextual cuing effect: Search speed became progressively shorter in the training phase, but it significantly lengthened during testing. The authors conclude that the visual system is capable of retaining spatial contextual memory established earlier to facilitate perception.

Intertrial temporal contextual cuing: association across successive visual search trials guides spatial attention.

Under incidental learning conditions, spatial layouts can be acquired implicitly and facilitate visual search (contextual-cueing effect). We examined whether the contextual-cueing effect is specific to the visual modality or transfers to the haptic modality. The participants performed 320 (experiment 1) or 192 (experiment 2) visual search trials based on a typical contextual-cueing paradigm, followed by haptic search trials in which half of the trials had layouts used in the previous visual search trials. The visual contextual-cueing effect was obtained in the learning phase. More importantly, the effect was transferred from visual to haptic searches; there was greater facilitation of haptic search trials when the spatial layout was the same as in the previous visual search trials, compared with trials in which the spatial layout differed from those in the visual search. This suggests the commonality of spatial memory to allocate focused attention in both visual and haptic modalities.

Transfer of spatial context from visual to haptic search.

A brief visual cue that attracts attention repels the perceived location of a subsequent visual stimulus away from the focus of attention (attentional repulsion). In the first experiment reported here, we presented a visual cue after a visual target and found that the perceived location of the target stimulus shifted toward the location of the cue (attentional attraction). The subsequent experiments ruled out nonattentional hypotheses and indicated that the mislocalization effect is attributable to the attentional shift. The results of this study suggest that preceding and succeeding contexts differentially modulate the perceived location of a briefly presented stimulus. Our findings also underscore the importance of retrospective processes in visual attention.

Fuminori Ono

Papers

The subjective size of visual stimuli affects the perceived duration of their presentation.

Cultural Differences in Perception and Attitude towards Robots

Intertrial temporal contextual cuing: association across successive visual search trials guides spatial attention.

Transfer of spatial context from visual to haptic search.

Attention Can Retrospectively Distort Visual Space