![]() ![]() For example, researchers continue to debate the relationship between physical time and the growth of subjective duration, with some arguing for a linear relationship 15 and others positing a non-linear mapping such as logarithmic compression. Partly for these reasons, many ‘big questions’ about time perception remain incompletely answered. Moreover, timing occurs over massively varying scales, from microseconds to years, 14 and at intermediate durations multiple mechanisms likely operate in parallel, complicating the search for simple information processing models and neural substrates. 12, 13 Rather, all sensory channels support time perception, and it is unclear how far these representations are mediated by common structures and mechanisms. For one thing, there is no time-sense organ or single pathway carrying temporal information from the periphery to the brain. 11 Indeed, time perception poses a number of unique challenges. However, it is also clear that, contrary to the hopes (or implicit assumptions) of early psychophysicists, 9, 10 the brain is not like the measuring devices of classical physics: there is no immutable mapping between external magnitudes and internal sensations that can be captured by simple mathematical functions. In fact, timing by many species (including humans) is approximately scale invariant, meaning that the whole response distribution scales directly with the length of the interval being timed. 5, 6 This research has brought many successes, such as the finding that, to a first approximation, timing across multiple species exhibits a scalar property such that the variability of temporal representations increases linearly with the timed duration for intervals ranging from perhaps hundreds of milliseconds to tens of minutes. Correspondingly, time perception was one of the earliest topics of experimental psychology and has been extensively studied for well over a century. The perception of time is fundamental to our experience and central to virtually all of our activities.
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