Time Perception (Bibliography)

The Cognitive Science of Time Perception
[A Lightly Annotated Bibliography]

Compiled by Emma Firestone
16 October 2010
** = highly recommended/of special interest
time perception: [a few] psychological, philosophical, and

formal approaches
**Gombrich, Ernst. ‘Moment and Movement in Art.’ Journal of the

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXVII (1964): 293-206.
Hoerl, Christoph and McCormack, Teresa, Eds. Time and Memory:

Issues in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
Brook, Andrew and Akins, Kathleen, Eds. Cognition and the Brain:
the philosophy and neuroscience movement. Cambridge: CUP,
2005. See chapters by Sean D. Kelly, ‘The Puzzle of Temporal
Experience’, and Rick Grush, ‘Brain Time and Phenomenal Time’.
neurobiology of time perception
Wittmann M. ‘The inner experience of time.’ Philosophical

Transactions of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences), 364 (2009):
1955-1967. Critical review of the most prominent models of the
architecture/neurobiology of time perception. Discusses empirical
findings on the relationship between emotion and time perception.
Suggests that activity in the insular cortex, the brain area that
integrates information about bodily states (visceral and emotional),
may cause the sensation of the passage of time—that body states
may prove to be the ‘building blocks of the timekeeping
mechanism.’
Eagleman DM, Holcombe AO et al. ‘Time and the brain: how

subjective time relates to neural time’. Journal of Neuroscience, 25
(2005): 10369-10371. Reviews the mapping between perceptions
of time and the coding of time in the nervous system.
Demonstrates that this mapping is not straightforward, i.e. that the
brain does not necessarily ‘use time to encode time.’
Craig AD. ‘Emotional moments across time: a possible neural basis

for time perception in the anterior insula.’ Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences), 364 (2009):
1933-42.
New J, Scholl BJ. ‘Subjective time dilation: spatially local, object-
based, or a global visual experience?’ Journal of Vision, 9 (2009).
time perception and attention
- The following articles developed the seminal ‘attentional

allocation’ model, which represents the effect of attention on
perceived duration of units of objective time. (It’s basically the
‘time flies when you’re having fun’ model.) In brief: when the
attention is focused explicitly on temporal judgment (how long is
this taking, anyway?), more capacity will be available for this
specific temporal processing, and duration will be judged as longer.
If the attention is distracted from temporal judgment by
(nontemporal) information processing activities, than duration will
be judged as shorter.
Thomas EAC, Brown TI. ‘Time perception and the filled-duration

illusion.’ Perception and Psychophysics, 16 (1974): 449-458.
Thomas EAC, Cantor NE. ‘Interdependence between the

processing of temporal and non-temporal information.’ In J
Requin, ed., Attention and performance VII (Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, 1978), 43-62.
Hicks RE, Brundige RM. ‘Judgments of temporal duration while

processing verbal and physiognomic stimuli.’ Acta Psychologica,
38 (1974): 447-453.
Hicks RE, Miller GW, Gaes G, Bierman K. ‘Concurrent processing

demands and the experience of time-in-passing.’ American
Journal of Psychology, 90 (1977): 431-446.
Brown SW. ‘Attentional resources in timing: interference effects in

concurrent temporal and nontemporal working memory tasks.’
Perceptual Psychophysics, 59 (1997): 1118-1140.
Tse PU, Intriligator J, Cavanaugh P. ‘Attention and the subjective

expansion of time.’ Perception and Psychophysics, 66 (2004):
1171-1189. The authors attribute the experience of the ‘subjective
expansion of time’ (in frightening moments, etc) to the
engagement of attention and its influence on the amount of
perceptual information processed.
Taatgen NA, van Rijn H, Anderson JR. ‘An integrated theory of

prospective time interval estimation: the role of cognition,
attention and learning.’ Psychology Review, 114 (2007), 577-598.
Marchetti G. ‘Studies on time: a proposal on how to get out of
circularity’. Cognitive Processing, 10.1 (2009): 7-40. Marchetti is a
theorist of Mind who, as part of his theory of time perception, has
developed an ‘attentional semantics’ very compatible with those of
the neuroscientists referenced above. He defines ‘time sensation’
as the perception of the cognitive effort made or energy expended
on temporal processing while one’s attention is simultaneously
consciously focused on nontemporal processing tasks.
**Eagleman DM, Pariyadath V. ‘Is subjective duration a signature of

coding efficiency?’
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Biological Sciences,
364 (2009), 1841-1851. The authors propose a unifying theory that
regards perceived duration as a function of the amount of energy
expended in mentally representing a given event (i.e. in the
‘efficiency’ of mentally ‘coding’ information about the event). When
more energy is expended on representing and processing
information (i.e. of novel stimuli), perceived duration dilations
occur; when less energy is expended (i.e. through repetition),
perceived durations compress.
time perception and memory

(most of this work demonstrates that ‘denser’ memories—possibly
created by more prolonged or expansive attention—generate the
perception of increased duration)
Fraisse, Paul. The Psychology of Time. New York: Harper and Row,
1963.
**Poynter, WD. ‘Judging the duration of time intervals: a process of

remembering segments of experience.’ In I Levin and D Zakay,
eds., Time and Human Cognition: A Life-span Perspective (Elsevier,
1989), 305-331.
Brown, SW. ‘Time, change, and motion: the effects of stimulus

movement on temporal perception.’ Perceptual Psychophysics, 57
(1995): 105-116.
**Stetson C, Fiesta MP, Eagleman DM. ‘Does time really slow down
during a frightening event? PLoS ONE, 2(12): e1295.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001295 . Reports on an experiment
showing that the phenomenon of time slowing down (growing in
duration) during a frightening event is a matter of recollection, not
perception; fear does not produce higher temporal resolution
(a.k.a. ‘bullet time’) but may encode more, richer memories that
yield the perception of longer duration.
time perception and causal inference
Eagleman, DM, Holcolmbe AO. ‘Causality and the perception of

time.’ Trends in Cognitive Science, 6.8 (2002): 323-5. Study
suggests that actions with perceived causal effects on events
(one’s finger pushing a button to produce a light) are regarding as
having occurred earlier than actions with no perceived causal
effect.
Haggard, P. ‘Voluntary action and conscious awareness.’ Nature

Neuroscience, 5 (2002), 382-5. Study demonstrates that tones that
appear to have been produced as a consequence of one’s
movement (intentionally) seem to occur earlier in time than
solitary tones. Intentionality encourages the illusion of reduced
duration.
**Faro D, McGill AL, Hastie R. ‘Naïve theories of causal force and

compression of elapsed time judgments.’ Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 98.5 (2010), 683-701. Examines some of the
cognitive mediators behind the well-documented ‘compression
effect’—that is, phenomenon whereby a perceived causal
relationship of two events correlates with a perceived shorter
interval between the two events.
other temporal illusions
Xuan B, Zhang D et al. ‘Larger stimuli are judged to last longer.’

Journal of Vision, 7 (2007): 105. Subjective duration is shown to
increase with larger stimulus magnitudes (number of dots, size or
luminance of squares, numeric value of digits). This indicates a
potential connection between the coding of ‘magnitude’
information in different modalities.
Lustig C. ‘Grandfather’s clock: attention and interval timing in older

adults.’ In WH Meek, ed., Functional and neural mechanisms of
interval timing (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2003), 261-293.
Rose D, Summers J. ‘Duration illusions in a train of visual stimuli.’

Perception, 24 (1995): 1177-1187. The first paper to demonstrate
that the initial stimulus in a repeated train of images will appear of
longer duration than subsequent stimuli in that train.
Pariyadath V, Eagleman DM. ‘The effect of predictability on
subjective duration.’ PLoS ONE 2 (2007). Proposes the novel
hypothesis (developed in ‘is subjective duration a signature of
coding efficiency?’, see above) that the amount of neural energy
required to represent a stimulus correlates with its perceived
duration. Traces a correspondence between the durational
distortions that occur in the ‘oddball’ paradigm and those that
accompany the observation of repeated stimuli (‘repetition
suppression’).

Time Perception (Bibliography)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Time Perception (Bibliography)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Time Perception (Bibliography)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Cognitive Science of Time Perception

[A Lightly Annotated Bibliography]

time perception: [a few] psychological, philosophical, and

**Gombrich, Ernst. ‘Moment and Movement in Art.’ Journal of the

Hoerl, Christoph and McCormack, Teresa, Eds. Time and Memory:

neurobiology of time perception

Wittmann M. ‘The inner experience of time.’ Philosophical

Eagleman DM, Holcombe AO et al. ‘Time and the brain: how

Craig AD. ‘Emotional moments across time: a possible neural basis

time perception and attention

- The following articles developed the seminal ‘attentional

Thomas EAC, Brown TI. ‘Time perception and the filled-duration

Thomas EAC, Cantor NE. ‘Interdependence between the

Hicks RE, Brundige RM. ‘Judgments of temporal duration while

Hicks RE, Miller GW, Gaes G, Bierman K. ‘Concurrent processing

Brown SW. ‘Attentional resources in timing: interference effects in

Tse PU, Intriligator J, Cavanaugh P. ‘Attention and the subjective

Taatgen NA, van Rijn H, Anderson JR. ‘An integrated theory of

**Eagleman DM, Pariyadath V. ‘Is subjective duration a signature of

time perception and memory

**Poynter, WD. ‘Judging the duration of time intervals: a process of

Brown, SW. ‘Time, change, and motion: the effects of stimulus

time perception and causal inference

Eagleman, DM, Holcolmbe AO. ‘Causality and the perception of

Haggard, P. ‘Voluntary action and conscious awareness.’ Nature

**Faro D, McGill AL, Hastie R. ‘Naïve theories of causal force and

other temporal illusions

Xuan B, Zhang D et al. ‘Larger stimuli are judged to last longer.’

Lustig C. ‘Grandfather’s clock: attention and interval timing in older

Rose D, Summers J. ‘Duration illusions in a train of visual stimuli.’

You might also like