Advances in Modern Mental Chronometry

Book excerpt: Mental chronometry encompasses all aspects of time processing in the nervous system and constitutes a standard tool in many disciplines including theoretical and experimental psychology and human neuroscience. Mental chronometry has represented a fundamental approach to elucidate the time course of many cognitive phenomena and their underlying neural circuits over more than a century. Nowadays, mental chronometry continues evolving and expanding our knowledge, and our understanding of the temporal organization of the brain in combination with different neuroscience techniques and advanced methods in mathematical analysis. In research on mental chronometry, human reaction/responses times play a central role. Together with reaction times, other topics in mental chronometry include vocal, manual and saccadic latencies, subjective time, psychological time, interval timing, time perception, internal clock, time production, time representation, time discrimination, time illusion, temporal summation, temporal integration, temporal judgment, redundant signals effect, perceptual, decision and motor time, etc. The aim of this research topic is to provide an overview of the state of the art in this field?its relevance, recent findings, current challenges, perspectives and future directions. Thus, as a result, a collection of 14 original research and opinion papers from different experts have been gathered together in a single volume. We hope this research topic will provide a useful framework and an up-to-date set of papers for further discussion on mental chronometry within the human brain. We are grateful to all the referees for their valuable support, effort, and time during the creation of the research topic. Granada, April 2015 José M Medina Willy Wong José A Díaz Hans Colonius