TIME PERCEPTION - Simon Grondin - École de psychologie, Université Laval, Québec, Canada

Mercoledì 08/02/2017 alle ore 11:30 in Aula Magna "Cesare Musatti"

25.01.2017

Approaching sensation scientifically is relatively straightforward. There are physical attributes for stimulating the central nervous system, and there are specific receptors for each sense for translating the physical signals into codes that brain will recognize. When studying time though, it is far from obvious that there are any specific receptors or specific stimuli. Consequently, it becomes important to determine whether psychological time obeys some laws or principles usually reported when other senses are studied. The purpose of this talk is to take a close look at the Weber’s law for time (or Weber fraction, i.e., variability to time ratio), more specifically for very brief intervals (< 2s). Recent findings will be presented, older pieces of the timing literature will be revisited and the psychological meaning of the non-constant Weber fraction will be argued to reflect a fundamental limit –a temporal span– in human information processing.  There will also be some discussion about the impact of the non-constant Weber fraction for the single-clock hypothesis and models of time perception.