Throughout the text, fundamental questions concerning the nature of visual perception are addressed.

This paper outlines some key issues that arise when agency and temporality are considered jointly, from the perspective of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology, and action theory. I address the difference between time simpliciter and time as represented as it figures in phenomena like intentional binding, goal-oriented action plans, emulation systems, and ‘temporal agency’. An examination of Husserl’s account of time consciousness highlights difficulties in generalizing his account to include a substantive notion of agency, a weakness inherited by explanatory projects like (...) neurophenomenology. I conclude by sketching a project analogous to the projects in neurophenomenology, based on Thompson’s naïve action theory. (shrink)

Stable neuronal assemblies are generally regarded as neural correlates of mental representations. Their temporal sequence corresponds to the experience of a direction of time, sometimes called the psychological time arrow. We show that the stability of particular, biophysically motivated models of neuronal assemblies, called coupled map lattices, is supported by causal interactions among neurons and obstructed by non-causal or anti-causal interactions among neurons. This surprising relation between causality and stability suggests that those neuronal assemblies that are stable due to causal (...) neuronal interactions, and thus correlated with mental representations, generate a psychological time arrow. Yet this impact of causal interactions among neurons on the directed sequence of mental representations does not rule out the possibility of mentally less efficacious non-causal or anti-causal interactions among neurons. (shrink)

Models of psychological time / Richard A. Block -- Implicit and explicit representations of time / John A. Michon -- The evasive art of subjective time...

Consciousness exists in time, but time is also to be found within consciousness: we are directly aware of both persistence and change, at least over short intervals. On reflection this can seem baffling. How is it possible for us to be immediately aware of phenomena which are not (strictly speaking) present? What must consciousness be like for this to be possible? In Stream of Consciousness I argued that influential accounts of phenomenal temporality along the lines developed by Broad and Husserl (...) were fundamentally flawed, and proposed a quite different account: the overlap model. While recognizing that the latter has merits, Gallagher argues that it too is fundamentally flawed; he also takes issue with some of my claims concerning Broad and Husserl. My reply comes in three main parts. I start by clarifying my use of certain terms, in particular realism and anti-realism as applied to theories of phenomenal temporality in general, and the accounts of Broad and Husserl in particular. I then turn to Gallagher’s main criticisms of the overlap theory. Gallagher argues that the theory is sunk by a problem with ongoing contents, that if our experience possessed the structures I ascribe to it, we would be aware of.. (shrink)

The paper addresses the question: why and how does Hamlet lose track of time in the Prayer-Closet scene sequence? While Deleuze aptly notes the poetic formula “the time is out of joint” is indicative of time no longer being subordinate to cyclical rhythms of nature, or as Polonius asserts: “Time is time”(II.ii.88), but rather movement being subordinated to time, it is argued that the HAMLET text goes further in its pre-figuration of Kant’s concept that time is a mysteriously autonomous form. (...) More specifically, it is explicated that in a Kantian sense Hamlet's temporary identification with the Ghost’s categorical sense of whatis possible and impossible in accordance with the passage of outer time is what causes Hamlet’s temporal confusion. (shrink)

Drawing on findings in psychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may...

The third edition of a work that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience, with extensive new material including new chapters and new contributors.

The literature on time perception is discussed. This is done with reference both to the ''cognitive-timer'' model for time estimation and to the subjective experience of apparent duration. Three assumptions underlying the model are scrutinized. I stress the strong interplay among attention, arousal, and time perception, which is at the base of the cognitive-timer model. It is suggested that a multiplicative function of two key components (the number of subjective time units and their size) should predict apparent duration. Implications for (...) other cognitive domains are drawn, and in particular an analogy is suggested between apparent duration and apparent movement. (shrink)

1. Introduction: The problems of time and consciousness What is time? St. Augustine remarked that when no one asked him, he knew what time was; however when someone asked him, he did not. Is time a process which flows? Is time a dimension in which processes occur? Does time actually exist? The notion that time is a process which "flows" directionally may be illusory (the "myth of passage") for if time did flow it would do so in some medium or (...) vessel (e.g. minutes per what?) [1]. But if time is a dimension in which processes occurred, e.g. as one component of a 4 dimensional spacetime, then why would processes occur unidirectionally in time? Yet we perceive time as an orderly, unidirectional process. An alternative explanation is that time does not exist as either a process or dimension, but that reality is a collage of discrete, disconnected and haphazardly arranged configurations of the universe, e.g. as described in Julian Barbour's "The end of time" [2]. In this view our perception of a unidirectional flow of time occurs because each moment, or "Now" as Barbour terms them, involves memory of other conceptually relevant moments, and the orderly flow of time is an illusion. Barbour's deconstruction of time contrasts the Newtonian reality of objects moving deterministically through 4 dimensional spacetime. Newton's contemporary (and rival) Leibniz [3] viewed the world in a manner consistent with Barbour (and with Mach's principle that the spatiotemporal structure of the universe is dependent on the distribution of mass, a foundation of Einstein's general relativity). According to Leibniz the world is to be understood not as matter/mass moving in a framework of space and time, but of more fundamental snapshot-like entities that momentarily fuse space and matter into single possible arrangements or configurations of the entire universe. Such configurations, which can be fabulously rich and complex considering the vastness of the universe, are the ultimate "things" of reality, which Leibniz termed "monads".. (shrink)

The conclusion of physics, within both a historical and more recent context, that an objectively progressive time and present moment are derivative notions without actual physical foundation in nature, illustrate that these perceived chronological features originate from subjective conscious experience and the neurobiological processes underlying it. Using this conclusion as a stepping stone, it is posited that the phenomena of an in-built subjective conception of a progressive present moment in time and that of conscious awareness are actually one and the (...) same thing, and as such, are also the outcome of the same neurobiological processes. A possible explanation as to how this might be achieved by the brain through employing the neuronal induced nonconscious cognitive manipulation of a small interval of time is proposed. The CIP phenomenon, elucidated within the context of this study is also then discussed. (shrink)

This paper first advances and discusses the hypothesis that so-called “iconic” or (for the auditory sphere) “echoic” memory is actually a form of perception of the past. Such perception is made possible by parallel inputs with differential delays which feed independently into the sensorium. This hypothesis goes well together with a set of related psychological and phenomenological facts, as for example: Sperling’s results about the visual sensory buffer, the facts that we seem to see movement and hear temporal Gestalts, and (...) the fact that we sometimes seem to hear sounds only after they have stopped. In it most simple form, and formulated in the somewhat misleading information processing idiom, my hypothesis says that each one of a number of parallel input lines with different delays feeds into a spatially separate sensory unit. The set of such units then holds information about the immediate past in what one might call a “chronotopic” sensory map. This contrasts with the idea (common in sensory buffer theory) that the received sensory information is kept (while possibly decaying) in the same unit for some time after it occurred. The hypothesis also contradicts the theory that all sensory information passes through the same unit but is then successively passed through a unidirectional chain of separate units, where the past experiences then become represented (the shift register hypothesis). The main advantage of my theory, beside the natural explanations it offers for the above-mentioned kind of phenomena, is that it postulates a parallel – and therefore robust – rather than a serial mechanism for the registering of temporal information. It can of course easily be modified to fit more complex models of the sensory cerebral code(s) as well as of the chronotopic representation as such. -/- In the second part of my poster, I advance a corresponding hypothesis for those motor commands which control brief movements. At closer inspection, most socalled “ballistic” movements do not seem to be truly ballistic (in the sense in which the movement of a cannonball is so) since the brain must exert some kind of feedforward control over the later part of their trajectory. I suggest that this control is at least sometimes realized by means of differentially delayed output from a chronotopic representation of successive segments of the movement. Not only could this be a biologically natural way of ensuring efficient adaptability of the movement; the hypothesis also explains the not uncommon experience of “seeing the whole movement laid out in advance” when it is initiated. (shrink)

The experience of time, and more particularly of duration, has been studied rather separately from its functional fundament: the memory process. Yet, in the past few years some rather intriguing patterns of connection have emerged. Especially the effect of the usual distinction between immediate memory (IM), short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM) (Shiffrin and Atkinson 1969; Norman 1970) seems to provide some conceptual cement to link the two fields: time and memory.

Philosophers have lately seized upon Sperling’s partial report technique and subsequent work on iconic memory in support of controversial claims about perceptual experience, in particular that phenomenology overflows cognitive access. Drawing on mounting evidence concerning postdictive perception, I offer an interpretation of Sperling’s data in terms of cue-sensitive experience which fails to support any such claims. Arguments for overflow based on change-detection paradigms (e.g., Landman et al., 2003; Sligte et al., 2008) cannot be blocked in this way. However, such paradigms (...) are fundamentally different from Sperling’s and, for rather different reasons, equally fail to establish controversial claims about perceptual experience. (shrink)

Time is an element that each of us experiences in the core of our being. Yet it also is one of the great mysteries in our conceptual grasp of reality. The notion of time has therefore been reflected upon and explored by thinkers and scientists since ancient times. In this essay I relate the multiple ways in which Antje's Jackelén's scholarly and stimulating work Time and Eternity analyzes the historical, philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives on the notion of time lived (...) and its relation to the conceptual endless time that we call eternity, and offer some of my own contextual reflections on the topic. (shrink)

This book is intended to be a standard reference work on the frontal lobes for researchers, clinicians, and students in the fields of neurology, neuroscience, ...