About this Research Topic
Recent trends of research have demonstrated that time perception in a multisensory world is subject to learning processes. From a development perspective, perception related to many facets of sub- and supra-second timing such as simultaneity judgment, temporal order judgment, duration/interval discrimination as well as rhythm (regularity) perception, unfolds across the life-span development, especially at the early stage of life (toddlers). Moreover, humans are active learners. That is, the engagement of the own body in a timing task within a perceptual-action loop will make a noticeable difference in timing performance, as compared to when humans only passively perceive the same perceptual scenario. This calls for a deep investigation of how the embodied experience shapes the perception of time and the timing of events.
Perception of sub- and supra-second duration might be recalibrated within a short-temporal scale, as typified in temporal ventriloquism illusion (trial-by-trial). On the other hand, timing abilities could be improved with perceptual learning. A major scientific question is whether the learning procedure changes the inherent time representation in each individual/unisensory modality and how consolidation makes a role in obtaining the learning benefits. Last but not least, the perception of the events in a cluttered environment usually calls for an economic and efficient temporal encoding. Ensemble coding (i.e., perceptual averaging) has been successfully applied in the spatial domain ---- extracting the spatial-surface related properties for a group of simultaneously presented visual objects. It remains largely unknown whether ensemble encoding, interfaced with statistical learning of the event patterns, could be implemented in perceiving sub- and supra- second in a multisensory context.
This Research Topic welcomes novel research on sub- and supra-timing, including newly developed research paradigms, theoretical models and perspectives, and articles concerning brain plasticity of time perception (also from a life-development perspective), and the investigations of contextual socio-cognitive influences on the perception of time.
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