Time Perception

Decline in motion perception

- older participants or those living with parkinson's disease have a decline in motion perception - participants were either younger (18-25) or older (55+) or were parkinson's patients Prediction: M report is earlier in older participants and parkinson's disease patients

What is time?

An experience that has no physical input - no dedicated neural systems - yet time is an important part for everything that we do

Logic of Libet paradigm

Based on the knowledge about the RP, libel examined its temporal relationship with the conscious experience of will (w) - libet reasoned that if volition or will were involved in the initiation of an action, then this volitional urge should be experiences as early as the onset of the readiness potential

Attention model of time perception

Events that demand attention and mental effort is translated to higher number of mental bits of information to process. the brain interprets this as more time being used up - when we are more attentive to an event, the event seems to last longer i.e. emotional events (accident, robery) looming disc study novel/different events (oddball paradigm) doesn't explain why time flies when you're having fun

Time and space

People talk about time using spatial metaphors (i.e. long vacation, short concert)

Modification to Libet paradigm

added a delayed sound when button is pressed - tone serves as an action feedback to trick participants to think that's when they're person the button

Mental number (time) line theory: Frassinetti et al.

Time is spatially organized - smaller magnitude on the left and larger magnitude on the right (like on the number line) Used prism goggles to distort their vision - people who saw more to the left underestimated time - people who saw more to the right overestimated time

Gable and Pool

Time passes even faster if you're feeling positive and feeling inspired to achieve a goal - shown pictures of a geometric shape, picture of flowers, and picture of cupcakes -tested people when the were hungry and full - people judged the image to last longer for geometric shape, shorter for flowers, and shortest for cupcake - if not hungry, picture of flower and cupcake were judged as the same duration

Circadian rhythms

daily sleep cycles, hours and days cycles like appetite cycles and hormone levels

Milliseconds

defined as the range between 10 ms to 500-1000 ms - used for timing of the fine motor movements - considered to be perceptual and outside of cognitive control

van Wassenhove et al

disc coming toward you "threatening" = time dilation (longer) disc moving away from you = time compression (shorter)

Machine intelligence

free will differentiates humans from preprogrammed machines. has an application in terms of artificial intelligence

Libet Paradigm

investigated human consciousness - interested in neural processes involved in volitional acts - wanted to know how the readiness potential is related to volition

Libet's results

libet observed that the conscious moment of volition was not experienced 300 ms after the onset of the RP - results suggest that the experience of volition is not involved in the initiation of an action - Libet's findings suggest that this belief is an illusion - the experience of volition is just a creation of the mine

Brain machine interface

locked in syndrome. can't communicate b/c paralyzed so machine can communicate on your behalf; the brain signals tell the machine

Microseconds

Used for sound localization and detection of intramural delays between left and right ear

Evidence for time and space relationship

people construct spatial representations when processing statements about time - mental number line theory - visual eccentricity

Seconds

ranges from 1 second to several seconds - believed to be conscious and within cognitive control

Oddball task

see a bunch of the same colored circles -> time is perceived to last the same amount of each - see a different color circle -> perceived that time lasts longer

Avni and Ritov

showed that if you had to think about a fun time you had from memory, you would judge it to be longer because you remember all the details

Kornhuber and Deecke

subjects performed self initiated movements (i.e. finger flexion) while their eeg was being recorded - observed brain activity that began 500-1000 ms before voluntary action

Neurolaw/Neuroethics

Free will implies intentionality and subsequently intentionality is used to determine the level of legal and moral responsibility of one's actions i.e. you shoot someone. the degree of punishment depends on whether you are willing and intentionally hurt the victim

Emotional events

Memorable, negative events seem to last longer than they actually do - explainable by the attentional model of time perception, requires attention resources

Isham and Le

Shifted stimuli instead further away from the fovea the longer you perceive it - results showed symmetrical time for both sides - mental number line theory works sometimes

Representational Momentum

Tendency to over-project the final position of a moving object along its trajectory

What drives representational momentum?

velocity and decline in motion perception

Buonomano and Karmarkar

we time events on scaled ranging from milliseconds to days (to years) -brain processes temporal info over a range of at least 10 orders of magnitude (microseconds -> daily circadian rhythms) - 4 categories: microseconds, milliseconds, seconds, and circadian rhythms

Time flies when you're having fun

when you are happy, time passes quickly in general - also believed that when you're busy (having fun) you do not notice the passage of time