Abstract
Time is a fundamental dimension of human perception, cognition and action, as the processing and cognition of temporal information is essential for everyday activities and survival. Innumerable studies have investigated the perception of time over the last 100 years, but the neural and computational bases for the processing of time remains unknown. Extant models of time perception are discussed before the proposition of a unified model of time perception that relates perceived event timing with perceived duration. The distinction between perceived event timing and perceived duration provides the current for navigating a river of contemporary approaches to time perception. Recent work has advocated a Bayesian approach to time perception. This framework has been applied to both duration and perceived timing, where prior expectations about when a stimulus might occur in the future (prior distribution) are combined with current sensory evidence (likelihood function) in order to generate the perception of temporal properties (posterior distribution). In general, these models predict that the brain uses temporal expectations to bias perception in a way that stimuli are ‘regularized’ i.e. stimuli look more like what has been seen before. As such, the synthesis of perceived timing and duration models is of theoretical importance for the field of timing and time perception.
Highlights
Time is a fundamental dimension that pervades all sensory, motor and cognitive processes
This paper calls for a theory of time perception that brings together duration and event timing into a single unified framework
The central aim of this review, is to elucidate how the brain may estimate when an event occurred in the world (Di Luca & Rhodes, 2016; Yarrow et al, 2015), and how this should be related to interval timing
Summary
Time is a fundamental dimension that pervades all sensory, motor and cognitive processes. Organisms, such as human beings, must quantify time in order to survive and interact with the environment efficiently and successfully. The fields of colour, object, taste, olfactory, distance, speech and depth perception all investigate tangible physical properties, whereas the dimension of time is invisible and transient. We review classic and modern approaches to temporal perception, before discussing the data from recent experiments that have shown how the timing of events changes in a way that is consistent with Bayesian Decision Theory. This paper calls for a theory of time perception that brings together duration and event timing into a single unified framework
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have