Temporal binding in interval and event perception: common psychological and neural underpinnings?

• Grant number: 19/08885-8
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: November 01, 2019
• End date: October 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Cognitive Psychology
• Agreement: Cardiff University
• Mobility Program: SPRINT - Projetos de pesquisa - Mobilidade
• Principal Investigator: André Mascioli Cravo
• Grantee: André Mascioli Cravo
• Principal researcher abroad: Marc Buehner
• Institution abroad: Cardiff University, Wales
• Host Institution: Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 17/25161-8 - The representation of temporal information in neural activity, AP.R

Abstract

Time is a central determinant of our interaction with the environment. It allows organisms to keep track of what is happening when in the world around them, as well as to them. Our ability to process time is a multi-faceted: On the one hand, we can track the time of occurrence of one event with respect to another; we can judge, for example, whether lightning preceded or followed thunder, or whether the lift arrived before or after we pressed the call button. On the other hand, we can also keep track of temporal intervals; we register the elapsed time between lightning and thunder and use this to estimate whether a thunderstorm is near or far, and we give up waiting for the lift if it hasn't arrived after a specific time following our button press. The importance of temporal processing for day-to-day life notwithstanding, current scientific understanding of how our brains keep track of time is relatively poor. For example, it is not clear whether similar mechanisms participate in judging when versus how long something happened. In this project, we will investigate the extent to which we use similar mechanisms to track intervals and event occurrence. We will use an illusion called temporal binding, in which two causal events are perceived temporally attracted to each other. In different tasks that will measure interval and event perception, we will measure the magnitude of this illusion. The findings will reveal whether these different types of temporal perception involve a single mechanism or if performance depends on task-dependent mechanisms. (AU)