Front. Psychol. Frontiers in Psychology Front. Psychol. 1664-1078 Frontiers Media S.A. 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00648 Psychology General Commentary Article Timing and time perception: A selective review and commentary on recent reviews Block Richard A. 1 * Grondin Simon 2 1Department of Psychology, Montana State University Bozeman, MT, USA 2École de psychologie, Université Laval Québec City, QC, Canada

*Correspondence: block@montana.edu

This article was submitted to Perception Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Edited by: Claire Zedelius, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Reviewed by: Hedderik Van Rijn, University of Groningen, Netherlands

 29 07 2014 2014 5 648 02 05 2014 06 06 2014 Copyright © 2014 Block and Grondin. 2014

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 A commentary on Perception and estimation of time by Fraisse, P. (1984). Annu. Rev. Psychol. 35, 1–36. doi: 10.1146/annurev.ps.35.020184.000245 A commentary on Properties of the internal clock: first- and second-order principles of subjective time by Allman, M. J., Teki, S., Griffiths, T. D., and Meck, W. H. (2014). Annu. Rev. Psychol. 65, 743–771. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115117 time perception attention animals humans commentary

A clear example of the progress in the field of timing and time perception could be obtained by contrasting two articles published 30 years apart in the influential Annual Review of Psychology (ARP): one by Fraisse (1984), and one by Allman et al. (2014). The fact that there was one author 30 years ago, and a group of authors now, is a tangible sign of the contemporary way of approaching scientific research. In his review, Fraisse emphasized the distinction between time perception and time estimation; in their review, Allman et al. focused on the internal clock and the cerebral bases of timing and time perception.

Fraisse's review was published when a very important event happened in the field of timing and time perception: a conference was held in New York, in 1983, where researchers from both human and animal time perception met to communicate with one another. The conference led to the publication of the classical book edited by the late John Gibbon and the late Lorraine Allan (Gibbon and Allan, 1984). This meeting probably catalyzed the research on timing and time perception, especially the one emphasizing the scalar expectancy theory and, more generally speaking, the internal clock perspective, a clock described as a pacemaker-counter device.

It is somewhat surprising that there was no mention in Fraisse (1984) of this promising (to say the least) pacemaker-counter perspective, which was already available in the human timing literature (Creelman, 1962; Treisman, 1963). Moreover, the modest portions of information in Fraisse dedicated to the cerebral bases of timing exemplify the gap between the contemporary research in the field and the state of the literature 30 years ago.

With its emphasis on neuroscience literature (e.g., brain areas, cortical circuits, pharmacological effects, and pathologies), Allman et al. wrote an important, well-structured, and interesting state-of-the-art review on the cerebral bases of the time perception mechanisms. It is a bit surprising though that the scalar property is taken for granted, given actually Fraisse's fundamental distinction between time perception and time estimation, a distinction that could find some echoes in the limitation of the stability of the Weber fraction for time (see Figure 3 in Gibbon et al., 1997; or, for instance, Grondin, 2001, 2010b, 2012, 2015). Moreover, assuming the linearity between psychological and physical time (psychophysical law) remains disputable (Eisler, 1976).

By emphasizing the internal clock perspective, it was not possible for Allman et al. (2014) to refer to other recent developments in the field. Amongst the portions of the literature the reader might want to consider, there is one on retrospective timing (Block and Zakay, 1997; Tobin et al., 2010). There is also some interesting research (e.g., Boltz, 1998; Brown, 2008) offering a purely cognitive explanation of psychological time and timing—without reference to an internal clock (see reviews by Block et al., 1999, 2010; Block, 2003). Even within the perspective of an internal clock, the attentional-gate model (see for example, Zakay and Block, 1995 and later articles), which in an extension of the scalar expectancy theory, is worth mentioning.

Indeed, with the large increase of research in the field of timing and time perception in the Twenty-first century, it is not surprising to see so many recent special issues of journals on this topic, or close variants of them. The explosion is such that researchers have written a large number of recent review articles (see Table 1). This was partly described in an annotated bibliography on “Time Perception” (Block and Hancock, 2013). Another tangible sign of the vitality of this research field is exemplified by a large COST grant funded by the E.U. (title: “Time In MEntaL activitY,” or “TIMELY”) and the resulting founding of the Brill's new scientific journal dedicated to the psychology of time, Timing and Time Perception, co-edited by Meck et al.

Selected list (in reverse chronological order) of reviews since 2010 on the psychology of time.

Type Authors Year Title
Book Merchant and de Lafuente 2015 Neurobiology of interval timing
SI Medina et al. 2014 Advances in modern mental chronometry
Book Vatakis and Allman 2014 Time distortions in mind: temporal processing in clinical populations.
Rev Allman et al. 2014 Properties of the internal clock: first- and second-order principles of subjective time
Rev Block and Gruber 2014 Time perception, attention, and memory: a selective review
SI Broadway et al. 2014 The long and short of mental time travel– self-projection over time-scales large and small
SI Buhusi 2014 Associative and temporal learning: New directions
Book Lloyd and Arstila 2014 Subjective time: the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality
Rev Matthews and Meck 2014 Temporal perception: the bad news and the good
SI Tucci et al. 2014 Timing in neurobiological processes: from genes to behavior compiled
SI Vatakis and Ulrich 2014 Temporal processing within and across senses (two Acta Psychologica special issues)
Bib Block and Hancock 2013 Time perception (annotated bibliography)
SI Coull et al. 2013 How does the brain process time?
Rev Merchant et al. 2013 Neural basis of the perception and estimation of time
Rev Wittmann 2013 The inner sense of time: how the brain creates a representation of duration
Rev Allman and Meck 2012 Pathophysiological distortions in time perception and timed performance
Rev Hancock and Block 2012 The psychology of Time: a view backward and forward
SI Meck et al. 2012 Interval timing and time-based decision making
Rev Coull et al. 2011 Neuroanatomical and neurochemical substrates of timing
Rev Gorea 2011 Ticks per thought or thoughts per tick? A selective review of time perception with hints on future research
SI Vatakis et al. 2011 Multidisciplinary aspects of time and time perception
Rev Block et al. 2010 How cognitive load affects duration judgments: a meta-analytic review
Rev Grondin 2010a Timing and time perception: a review of recent behavioral and neuroscience findings and theoretical directions

Book is an edited book. Rev is a review article. SI is a special issue. Bib is a bibliography.

In conclusion, being a researcher in the field of timing and time perception has never been as exciting as it is at present, given the growth of its popularity, which has been enhanced by the arrival of contributions from neuroscientists. This excitement could be extended if one considers psychological time in an even larger perspective, or larger scale from the memory for the past events (Friedman, 1993) to the capacity to predict the duration of future events (Roy et al., 2005).

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

We thank Keith Hutchison and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful suggestions on drafts of this commentary.

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