Time perception

About: Time perception is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1918 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87020 citations.

How Time Flies: Age, Memory, and Temporal Compression

Abstract: We formulate a comprehensive theory that accounts for variation in the perception of time According to our theory, lived time is perceived to pass slowly (protracted duration) when conscious infor

The Crossed-Hands Deficit in Tactile Temporal-Order Judgments: The Effect of Training

Abstract: Several recent studies have shown that judgments of temporal order for tactile stimuli presented to the two hands are greatly affected by crossing the hands. The size of the threshold for judging temporal order may be up to four times larger with the hands crossed as compared to the hands uncrossed. The results from these recent studies suggest that with crossed hands, contrary to many situations involving the integration of tactile and proprioceptive information, subjects have difficulty in adjusting their perception of tactile inputs to correspond with the spatial positions of the hands. In the present study we examined the effect of training in judging temporal order on the size of this crossed-hands deficit--the difference in the thresholds for temporal-order judgments when the hands are crossed and uncrossed. All training procedures produced significant declines in the size of the deficit. With training, the difference between crossed-hands and uncrossed-hands temporal-order thresholds dropped from several hundred milliseconds to as little as 19 ms. A group of percussionists with experience in playing with crossed hands showed the same crossed-hands effects as non-musicians. The results were consistent in showing that the crossed-hands deficit was never completely eliminated but was greatly reduced with training. The implication is that subjects are able to adjust to the crossed-hands posture with modest amounts of training. The results are discussed in terms of the explanations that have been offered for the crossed-hands deficit.

Time perception: the surprising effects of surprising stimuli.

Abstract: The effects of stimulus repetition often increase when repetitions are more common (i.e., when repeats become more predictable), consistent with the idea that repetition effects reflect expectations about the recurrence of recent items. In contrast, the present experiments found a surprising pattern in which the compressed subjective duration of repeated items was reduced, eliminated, and even reversed when the frequency of repetitions was increased. Experiments 1-4b found that this pattern generalized across tasks, durations, and stimulus types; Experiments 5-9 investigated the mechanisms underlying these effects and suggest that recent exposure produces a short-lived contraction of subjective time consistent with a low-level process, such as neural fatigue, whereas elevating the predictability of a repeat produces a subjective time expansion that may result from more efficient perceptual processing. These findings (a) establish the important point that first-order repetition and second-order repetition expectations can have opposing functional effects, a possibility that has received little attention in general treatments of repetition effects, (b) run contrary to existing accounts of repetition effects in time perception, and suggest that there may be no simple mapping between apparent duration and the overall magnitude of the neural response, and (c) suggest a framework in which subjective time depends on the interplay between bottom-up signal strength and top-down gain control.

Discrete events as units of perceived time.

Abstract: In visual images, we perceive both space (as a continuous visual medium) and objects (that inhabit space). Similarly, in dynamic visual experience, we perceive both continuous time and discrete events. What is the relationship between these units of experience? The most intuitive answer may be similar to the spatial case: time is perceived as an underlying medium, which is later segmented into discrete event representations. Here we explore the opposite possibility--that our subjective experience of time itself can be influenced by how durations are temporally segmented, beyond more general effects of change and complexity. We show that the way in which a continuous dynamic display is segmented into discrete units (via a path shuffling manipulation) greatly influences duration judgments, independent of psychophysical factors previously implicated in time perception, such as overall stimulus energy, attention and predictability. It seems that we may use the passage of discrete events--and the boundaries between them--in our subjective experience as part of the raw material for inferring the strength of the underlying "current" of time.