ELSC Seminar Series

Cognitive models of interval timing postulate an abstract pacemaker whose ticks are counted and accumulated to form an internal representation of time. However, physiological manifestations of the pacemaker or the accumulation process have not yet been identified. This leaves open the question: what is time perception made of? My talk will touch upon two main aspects of interval timing. First, I will survey psychophysical work examining a putative role for sensory processing in the subjective sense of time. Second, I will present a series of studies using EEG which investigate neural signatures of temporal evidence accumulation. We use a temporal estimation task and characterize a physiological response which clearly scales with the subjective sense of time. In my presentation I will offer a conceptual framework and describe a computational model that captures behavioral performance and predicts the physiological response. We then generalize this finding across sensory modalities (vision and touch) and temporal contexts (three different time-ranges). Taken together, the work provides a new way to study the cognitive processes underlying temporal decisions, using a combination of behavior, EEG and modelling.