On the physiological and the psychological mechanism of time perception

时间感知在我们的日常生活中扮演着重要的角色，当我们与他人交流时，察觉环境的变化，控制身体运动。为了解释Nakajima最近发现的一些错觉现象，我们提出并检验了两种假设，以解释包含50-500毫秒短时间间隔的时间模式的感知机制。处理时间假设声称，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次发作后所需的额外处理时间成正比。这个假设既解释了空持续时间的非比例心理物理功能，也解释了一种叫做时间收缩的错觉，即在一个空持续时间之前，紧接著另一个更短的空持续时间。事件构建模型假设音调的开始和终止是独立检测的，并且当音调的开始和结束足够接近时，它们可以在感知上相互连接。虽然这个模型相当简单，但它很好地解释了一些感知现象，并且它也可以扩展到描述更多的现象。间隙转移错觉就是一个典型的例子。当一个超过2000 ms的上升滑音和一个大约500 ms的下降滑音在大约1000 Hz的频率下交叉在一起，共享时间中线时，在较长分量中间的时间间隙被感知到，好像它已经转移到较短分量中。我们试图将一些格式塔原理与上述假设联系起来，并开发了心理物理学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.