Temporal Heterogeneity in the Perception of Time

Background and Aim : A great deal of research has been conducted to reveal the underlying mechanism of time perception in humans, yet the main question remains still in debate. In an attempt to approach this question, a time production task was designed to investigate the possible dependency of time perception measured by participant response time (i.e. perceived time) of the length of the target time.Methods : Task consisted of 10 blocks of 10 target times from 550 to 1000 milliseconds spaced 50 milliseconds. In each block, the participant was asked to press the button after she felt a time interval equal to the block target time. The participant response time was shown to her as a feedback. The experiment was conducted with 17 participants, each participating in two sessions of the task with a gap of three days. Performance of participants through different blocks of the task was evaluated regarding two different aspects of temporal perception, namely accuracy of time perception and learning ability.Results : The observations revealed heterogeneity in the time perception demonstrating that human temporal perception, both time perception accuracy, and learning ability, rhythmically depends on the length of target times. The pattern of subjects’ response profiles were significantly consistent across both sessions.Conclusion : . The consistent pattern of dependency on time perception suggests a new oscillatory model of time processing in the human brain. Either time-clock theory or population processing can be explained by our observations. Therefore, these observations shed light on our understanding of the underlying mechanism of time perception.

کلیدواژه ها:

human time perception ، temporal heterogeneity ، accuracy ، learning ability