Perceived Timing is not Perfect.

A few months ago, Myself, Susan Li and Max Di Luca published a paper in Timing & Time Perception that showed how the perceived timing of events in a sequence of regularly-timed tones is not perfect.

That is, to perceive tones as being 'on time' you have to present them slightly later than regular timing (Figure top panel). Things presented on time are not perceived as being on time. This is quite surprising and counterintuitive, and indeed is opposite to what most models of time perception predict. This means that stimuli presented 'on time' are actually perceived slightly earlier, as such we suggest they are actually perceptually accelerated... Why? Well if you believe in things like entrainment and the active sensing framework, then when temporal attention is directed towards a particular point in time, the increase in attentional resources facilitates the perception of things encountered at the expected time, and as such, gives them a little kick forward (Figure, bottom panel). 

We also found that temporal sensitivity to temporal irregularities increases as the amount of stimuli in a sequence increases. This is not a new finding, and has been reported lots of times in different ways... however, in this paper, we compared different models of temporal sensitivity, and formulated some interval based models to be predictive about the perceived (event) timing of events. We find that actually, most of the models are mathematically the same, but they cannot deal with formulating estimates of temporal sensitivity and perceived timing.

Maybe a new model is needed that can model both the perceived timing and temporal sensitivity of events....? Obvious foreshadowing there. 

​A pre-print of this paper is found in the 'Publications' page of this website for more technical summaries of the models and methods used in this paper.