Temporal numerosity and the psychological unit of duration.

Abstract

Functions relating the perceived number of flashes to the number of flashes presented were obtained for stimulus presentation rates varying from 10 to 30 flashes per sec. These relationships, called temporal numerosity functions, provide information regarding the rate of increase in the perceived number and indicate the existence of critical points in time following the onset of stimulation. It is assumed that these findings describe the temporal characteristics of a basic central process underlying perception. The results of these studies, and similar studies with other sense modalities, are considered in relation to the concept of the psychological unit of duration, or moment, and also in relation to certain neurophysiological processes whose temporal characteristics are markedly similar to those exhibited by the perceptual results.The concept of time has always held an important place in philosophy and science. Of particular interest, for present purposes, are the questions which have arisen concerning the perception of time and the role of time in perception.One very persistent idea has been that there are natural units of duration, which are a function of the organism itself. William James discussed this at length in The Principles of Psychology (James, 1890, pp. 60S-642), referring to it as "the law of time's discrete flow." It is interesting to note, in view of later developments, that he invoked the concept of "waxing and waning brain processes" to account for this discontinuity. He went so far as to suggest that without such processes we could not have a conception of time at all.

Multisensory numerosity judgments for visual and tactile stimuli

“…Instead, the types of information (or resources) required to compute the number of visual and tactile stimuli presented in the display at any one time appear to interact with each other at some level of information processing. Our results go beyond earlier attempts to determine the locus of the bottleneck in making numerosity judgments (see Cheatham & White, 1952;Harter & White, 1967;White, 1963;White, Cheatham, & Armington, 1953, for early attempts to elucidate the locus of the limitation in unimodal visual numerosity judgments) by suggesting that the point at which information processing constrains numerosity judgments is cross-modally constrained (i.e., the point of constraint occurs after the unimodal processing of information available to each sensory modality).…”

Entrainment of respiration to repetitive finger tapping

“…SiC acts-for instance, the gait of a pedestrian which falls into synchrony with a passing band, periodicity in reaction time distributions (White & Harter, 1969), intermittent sampling of input for hand control (Navas & Stark, 1968), and the psychological moment (Murphree, 1954;White, 1963). In other words, there appears to be a temporal as well as spatial constraint upon the output of the neural control mechanism for breathing.…”

Minding time in an amodal representational space

“…The 'time quantum' in physiology ( Von Baer 1876), the 'specious present' in psychology (Clay 1882;James 1890) and the 'cinematographic hypothesis' in philosophy (Bergson 1888(Bergson , 1909 are contemporary notions in which the 'river metaphor of time' vanishes and which initiate a novel approach consisting in determining the unit(s) of time perception (Mabbott 1951;Stroud 1955;White 1963;Blumenthal 1977). To date, the lack of distinction between content and format has prevented to resolve this question.…”