Temporal Perception

The nature of temporal experience is typically explained in one of a small number of ways, most are versions of either retentionalism or extensionalism. After describing these, I make a distinction between two kinds of temporal character that could structure temporal experience: A-ish contents are those that present events as structured in past/present/future terms, and B-ish contents are those that present events as structured in earlier-than/later-than/simultaneous-with relations. There are a few exceptions, but most of the literature ignores this distinction, and silently assumes temporal experience is A-ish. I then argue that temporal character is not scale invariant, but rather that temporal experience is A-ish at larger scales (a few hundred milliseconds and above), and B-ish at smaller scales. I then point out that this scale non-invariance opens the possibility of hybrid views. I clarify (or modify, depending on how you want to frame it) my own view (Grush 2005, 2007) as a hybrid view, according to which temporal experience is B-ish at small scales – and at this scale my trajectory estimation model (TEM, a version of retentionalism) applies – but A-ish at larger scales, and at the larger scale my TEM does not apply.  I then motivate this hybrid position by first defending it against arguments that have tried to show that the TEM is untenable. Since the hybrid view has TEM as its small-scale component, it must address this objection. I then put pressure on the main alternative account, extentionalism, by showing that its proponents have not adequately dealt with the problem of temporal illusions. The result is a new theory (perhaps characterizable as a refined version of my prior theory) motivated by i) explaining its virtues, ii) showing that objections to it can be met, and iii) showing that objections to its main competitors have not been met.

This chapter explores to what extent some core ideas of predictive processing can be applied to the phenomenology of time consciousness. The focus is on the experienced continuity of consciously perceived, temporally extended phenomena (such as enduring processes and successions of events). The main claim is that the hierarchy of representations posited by hierarchical predictive processing models can contribute to a deepened understanding of the continuity of consciousness. Computationally, such models show that sequences of events can be represented as states of a hierarchy of dynamical systems. Phenomenologically, they suggest a more fine-grained analysis of the perceptual contents of the specious present, in terms of a hierarchy of temporal wholes. Visual perception of static scenes not only contains perceived objects and regions but also spatial gist; similarly, auditory perception of temporal sequences, such as melodies, involves not only perceiving individual notes but also slightly more abstract features (temporal gist), which have longer temporal durations (e.g., emotional character or rhythm). Further investigations into these elusive contents of conscious perception may be facilitated by findings regarding its neural underpinnings. Predictive processing models suggest that sensorimotor areas may influence these contents.

Penultimate draft. Forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience, ed. by Ian Phillips.

Introduction
When thinking about time, we can distinguish two subjects: the nature of time and our experience of time. A theory of time should be able to accommodate the way we experience temporality. A viable account of temporal consciousness should be compatible with our best theory of time. This article investigates how presentism accounts for our experience of time. According to presentism, all and only present things exist.  Presentists argue that their view is the most intuitive, capturing best what most people (pre-philosophically) think about time: you and I exist but the Roman Empire does not exist anymore, whereas the Olympic Games 2020 do not exist yet.  Time passes: what is future will be present, what is present will be past and what is past was once present. Presentists not only claim to capture what most people think about time but also how we experience time. In particular, they claim that we all experience time as passing and that this is best explained by the fact that time really does pass.  This gives presentism an intuitive advantage over other theories of time. Or so presentists say.

This might puzzle some. After all, change is the having of incompatible properties at different times, but since presentism only ever allows one time, the present time, one might wonder if and how presentists can account for change and change experiences. I will concentrate on the latter and focus on two Central Questions. 
CQ (1): Can presentism, given theory X of temporal perception, account for experiences of change and duration? 
CQ (2): Can presentism, given theory X of temporal perception, account for experiences of time as passing?

Before we consider these questions, however, we will have to look at a more general problem that arises for presentism and perceptual experience in §1. Since we only ever perceive what is already past, presentists owe us an explanation how to make sense of perceptual experience at all. Whether they succeed depends on the theory of perception adopted. From there, I will move on to temporal perception, providing a very brief overview of the debate on temporal perception in §2. §3-§5 aim to answer the Central Questions. Three accounts will be considered: anti-realism, retentionalism and extensionalism. Regarding CQ(1), I argue that the combination of presentism, an indirect theory of perception and retentionalism is most likely able to account for experiences of change, depending on a viable presentist account of causal relations. As for CQ(2), it turns out that none of the combinations considered can accommodate experiences of temporal passage in the sense relevant for presentists. The last section concludes with a short summary of the results of my investigation.

This paper situates an original model of reentrant oscillatory multiplexing within the philosophy of time consciousness to argue for an extensionalist theory of the specious present. I develop a detailed differential latency model of apparent motion to show how the ordinality of experiential content is isomorphic to the ordinality of relevant brain processes. I argue that the theory presented has resources to account for other key features of the specious present, including the representational discreteness between successive conscious moments as well as the phenomen-ological continuity between them. This work not only shows the plausibility of an extensionalist philosophical theory, it also illustrates the utility of differential latency views in squaring temporal illusions with empirically supported neurodynamics.

The Chinese used to look at the history and seek answers to solve current problems. Traditional values are highly promoted. The current study looked at this phenomenon from a cognitive linguistic point of view, do Chinese speakers think that the future is back and the past is front? A body-sway experiment was conducted based on a previous pilot study, and it found that Mandarin speakers' body movement patterns were consistent with the front-past and back-future associations. This result is also consistent with the idea that sequential time is dominant in Mandarin, suggesting that not only linguistically, Mandarin speakers also physically showed an implicit preference to view the past as ahead.

Color-motion asynchrony (CMA) refers to an apparent asynchrony of visual features when a repeatedly oscillating moving dots change colour and motion direction simultaneously at the same rate (Moutoussis & Zeki, 1997). It has been demonstrated that a single direction change is enough to induce CMA in cross-feature correspondence tasks (Linares & Lopez-Moliner, 2006). Following a recent study, where Stetson et al (2006) have shown a reversal effect in the subjective order of simultaneous action and sensation after subjects were adapted to a delayed sensory feedback regime, here, we examined whether such visuo-motor temporal recalibration is sensory-feature-specific and transferrable to multi-feature-stimuli in correspondence tasks such as CMA. We first measured the effect of visuo-motor recalibration in an experiment where subjects judged the temporal order of a voluntary key press and a change in the motion direction of an achromatic dot array following a delayed (~100ms) sensory feedback adaptation in response to causal action. For those of subjects, who showed significant adaptation effects, we then conducted the main experiment using a single-direction-change CMA paradigm, where direction change was induced by voluntary key press and subjects were asked to report the predominant motion direction of target colour. Compared to baseline condition, we found that CMA was significantly reduced for the delayed sensory feedback adaptation condition. Control experiments showed that visuo-motor adaptation effects are not observed when the change in direction occurs independent of subject’s key press, which together show a temporal recalibration effect in a visuo-motor CMA paradigm due to voluntary action.

We show that visuo-motor temporal recalibration elicited with respect to a single visual feature (motion direction) in response to a voluntary causal action is transferrable to multi-feature-stimuli (i.e. chromatic dots changing motion direction) and reduce colour-motion asynchrony in a single-direction-change paradigm.

Is it the case that, in order to have a perceptual experience as of change, duration or any other temporally extended occurrence at all, the duration of the experience itself must come apart from the apparent duration of what is experienced? I shall argue that such a view is at least coherent. I set out to deal with a range of arguments from the literature. Some of these arguments purport to show that it is not possible for the duration of experience to deviate from the apparent duration of its objects. Others argue that the durations do not have to come apart in order for us to experience temporally extended items.  The largest part of the paper will be concerned with an objection from Ian Phillips (Phillips 2010);(Phillips 2014). The objection is interesting insofar as it is an argument from introspection. If it worked, it would give us a priori, non-empirical grounds for thinking that a cluster of views about temporal perception are wrong, or worse, impossible. As I will argue, though, the objection fails. Towards the end, I briefly explore the view that we have no introspective access at all to the duration of our experiences. I suggest that such a view may well be supported by some considerations about the phenomenal continuity of consciousness.

The experience of the present moment is characterized by an integrative mechanism that fuses successive events into a unitary phenomenological experience with a temporal limit of about 3 s. We hypothesized that proficiency of mindfulness expands the ability to stabilize an ambiguous percept in a bistable image paradigm using the Necker Cube, and that this effect is associated with individual differences in the level of mindfulness. Expanded duration of nowness as indicated by the ability to stabilize a bistable image stimulus for a longer period of time may improve cognitive resources and thus be of practical interest. In a sample of n = 38 meditators and n = 38 non-meditators, meditators showed longer duration of subjective nowness. This effect was associated with individual mindfulness levels. It is concluded that the subjective now can be longer for meditators than for non-meditators, and individual levels of mindfulness may convey this effect.► The subjective now is longer for mindfulness meditators than for non-meditators. ► Individual differences in the mindfulness level may account for this difference. ► Duration of subjective now for meditators is longer than the typical 3 s period.

My previous study showed that English and Mandarin speakers perceive temporal information mostly differently on the sagittal and vertical dimensions. The current study look at the effect of temporal information on bodily movements. Sequential time is dominant in Mandarin, and we found that Mandarin-English bilinguals' body movement patterns in the Mandarin condition were consistent with sequential time. English monolinguals' body movement patterns varied according to what type of information they perceived. When they perceived a first person's information, they behaved according to deictic time, and when they perceived a third person's information, they behaved according to sequential time. These results are consistent with the difference between deictic time and sequential time and for the first time it was found that people's bodily motion can also be consistent with sequential time.