On the physiological and the psychological mechanism of time perception

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Time perception plays an important role in our everyday life when we commnicate with other people, detect changes in the environement, and control bodily motions. We investigated the mechanism of the perception of temporal patterns containing short time intervals of 50-500 ms.Two hypotheses were proposed and examined in order to explain a few illusory phenomena, which Nakajima found recently. The processing time hypothesis claims that the subjective duration of an inter-onset interval (or an empty time interval) is in propotion to its physical duration plus an additional processing time required after the detection of the second onset. This hypothesis explains both the non-proportional psychophysical function of empty duration and an illusion called time-shrinking, i.e., underestimation of an empty duration preceded immediately by another empty duration which is shorter.The event construction model is based on the assumption that onsets and terminations of tones are detected independently and that an onset and a termination can be connected with each other perceptually when they are close enough to each other. Although this model is rather simple, it explains a couple of perceptual phenomena fairly well, and it can be also expanded to describe a few more phenomena. The gap transfer illusion is a typical example. When an ascending glide tone longer than 2000 ms and a descending glide tone of about 500 ms cross each other sharing the temporal middle at about 1000 Hz, a temporal gap in the middle of the longer component is perceived as if it had been transferred into the shorter component.We attempted to relate a few Gestalt principles with the above hypotheses, and developed psychophysical and neurophysiological procedures to investigate these Gestalt principles.