Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Types of elementary timing or temporal processing experiences

According the Rammsayer and Brandler (2006, in press), a major controversy in the field of human timing is whether psychological time is governed by a unitary (domain-general) timing mechanism, separate (domain-specific) mechanisms, and/or whether a domain-general internal mental clock can explain the subset of distinct elementary temporal/timing experiences.

What are the major classes of elementary timing experiences that a master internal mental clock theory/model would need to explain? According the Rammsay and Brandler, they are:
  • Interval timing: Is often explained by the general assumption of a hypothetical internal clock based on neural counting. The neural pacemaker generates pulses or ticks with the number of pulses corresponding to a physical time interval that is recorded by an accumulator. The number of pulses counted during a given time interval is the internal representation of this interval.
  • Rhythm perception: The subjective grouping of objectively separate events or discrimination processes in serial temporal patterns.
  • Temporal-order judgment (TOJ): Refers to the question of how much time must intervene between the onsets of two different stimuli for their order to be perceived correctly.
  • Simultaneity and successiveness: Concerned with the size of the temporal interval between two sensory events that is required for them to be perceived as two separate events (successiveness) rather than fused as one event (simultaneity)

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would love to see on this site a review of Jensen's recently published "Clocking the mind".

Kevin McGrew said...

Excellent idea. It reminds me that I need to purchase this book. I'll look around and see if I can find any formal reviews. Thanks again.