On the physiological and the psychological mechanism of time perception

当我们与他人交流、察觉环境变化、控制身体运动时，时间知觉在我们的日常生活中扮演着重要的角色。我们研究了包含50-500毫秒短时间间隔的时间模式的知觉机制。为了解释Nakajima最近发现的一些虚幻现象，提出并检验了两个假说。加工时间假说认为，发作间隔(或空时间间隔)的主观持续时间与其物理持续时间加上检测到第二个发作后所需的额外处理时间成正比。这一假设解释了空时长的非比例心理物理功能和一种被称为时间收缩的错觉，即低估了紧接在空时长之前的另一个更短的空时长。事件建构模型基于这样的假设：声调的开始和结束是独立检测的，并且当开始和结束足够接近时，它们可以感知地相互联系。虽然这个模型相当简单，但它很好地解释了几个感知现象，并且它还可以扩展到描述更多的现象。缺口转移错觉就是一个典型的例子。当一个大于2000ms的上升滑音和一个大约500ms的下降滑音在大约1000赫兹的频率下相互交叉时，长成分中间的时间间隙被认为是转移到了短成分中。我们试图将几个格式塔原理与上述假设联系起来，并开发了心理物理和神经生理学程序来研究这些格式塔原理。

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.