Time perception

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

Right on time: prediction-errors bidirectionally bias time perception

Abstract: Summary The brain updates internal representation of the environment by using the mismatch between the predicted state/outcome and the actual one, termed prediction-error. In parallel, time perception in the sub-second range is crucial for many behaviors such as movement, learning, memory, attention and speech. Both time-perception and prediction-errors are essential for everyday life function of an organism, and interestingly, the striatum was shown to be independently involved in both functions. We therefore hypothesized that the putative shared circuitry might induce behavioral interaction, namely that prediction-errors might bias time perception. To examine this, participants performed a time-duration discrimination task in the presence of positive and negative prediction-errors that were irrelevant and independent of the main task. We find that positive/negative prediction-errors induce a bias in time perception by increasing/decreasing the perceived time, respectively. Using functional imaging, we identify an interaction in Putamen activity between encoding of prediction-error and performance in the discrimination task. A model that accounts for the behavioral and physiological observations confirms that the interaction in regional activations for prediction-errors and time-estimation underlies the observed bias. Our results demonstrate that these two presumably independent roles of the striatum can actually interfere or aid one another in specific scenarios.

The Theoretical Models and Prospect of Time Perception

Abstract: Time perception includes duration perception and temporal order perception.There are mainly four types of theoretical models of duration perception,including pacemaker-accumulator model,resource allocation model,memory strength decay model,and state-dependent network model.Temporal order perception refers to central-timing mechanism,feature-specific mechanism,and information strength hypothesis.The duration and order perception are both considered by hierarchical periodic oscillation model and range-synthetic model of temporal cognition.The future work should to identify the relationship between time perception and conscious,to expand the application fields of time perception,focus on interdisciplinary integration and combination of multiple methods.

Distortions of Time Perception: The Oddball Effect

Abstract: Duration perception can be affected by the oddness of stimuli. An oddball stimulus will be judged to have lasted longer than others of equal physical duration in a repeated series. It has been suggested that there are three main hypotheses to explain the subjective expansion of duration: attention hypothesis, arousal hypothesis and the neural coding efficiency hypothesis. The issues, such as variable confusion, the cross-modal effects and the time factors, are worth considering for future studies. Furthermore, no agreements are reached on the psychological and neural mechanisms of the subjective expansion of duration, and further explorations to these problems are of great significance to understand duration perception.

Time Perception: A Review on Psychological, Computational and Robotic Models

Abstract: Animals exploit time to survive in the world. Temporal information is required for higher-level cognitive abilities such as planning, decision making, communication, and effective cooperation. Since time is an inseparable part of cognition, there is a growing interest in the artificial intelligence approach to subjective time, which has a possibility of advancing the field. The current survey study aims to provide researchers with an interdisciplinary perspective on time perception. Firstly, we introduce a brief background from the psychology and neuroscience literature, covering the characteristics and models of time perception and related abilities. Secondly, we summarize the emergent computational and robotic models of time perception. A general overview to the literature reveals that a substantial amount of timing models are based on a dedicated time processing like the emergence of a clock-like mechanism from the neural network dynamics and reveal a relationship between the embodiment and time perception. We also notice that most models of timing are developed for either sensory timing (i.e. ability to assess an interval) or motor timing (i.e. ability to reproduce an interval). The number of timing models capable of retrospective timing, which is the ability to track time without paying attention, is insufficient. In this light, we discuss the possible research directions to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in the field of time perception.