Sub-and Supra-Second Timing: Brain, Learning and Development

Book excerpt: Time perception in the range of milliseconds to a few seconds is essential for many important sensory and perceptual tasks including speech perception, motion perception, motor coordination, and cross-modal interaction. For the brain to be in synchrony with the environment, the physical differences in the speeds of light and sound, as well as stimuli from other modalities such as odors, must be processed and coordinated (Pöppel & Bao 2014; Bao et al., 2015). Time is a subjective feeling that is modulated by emotional states which trigger temporal distortions (temporal dilation vs. contraction) (Wittmann et al., 2014), hence give rise to subjective time that may be different to event time as initially registered in the brain. Recent research suggests that time perception in a multisensory world is subject to prior task experience and shaped by (statistical) learning processes. Humans are active learners. That is, the engagement of the own body in a timing task within a perceptual-action loop will make a noticeable difference in timing performance, as compared to when humans only passively perceive the same perceptual scenario (Bao et al., 2015; Chen & Vroomen, 2013). This Research Topic of “Sub-and Supra-Second Timing: Brain, Learning and Development” has integrated sixteen submissions of novel research on sub- and supra-timing. We have categorized the papers in this topic into the following four themes, from which we can deduce trends of research about multisensory timing in the sub- and supra-second range: Sensory timing, interaction and reliability Adaptive representation of time, learning and temporal prediction Sensorimotor synchronization, embodiment and coordination Perspective of psychological moment and temporal organization Overall, the collections in “Sub-and Supra-Second Timing: Brain, Learning and Development” show some recent trends and debates in multisensory timing research as well as provide a venue to inspire future work in multisensory timing.