Meeting of minds: Skinner and Michotte at the International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, 1951.

This note discusses the apparently unpublished correspondence between B. F. Skinner and the Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte, preceding Skinner's visit to the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951.

Filling your time: Auditory flutter alters perceived duration via stimulus-locked responses.

In the current article, we examined the flutter-duration illusion; the extension of perceived duration when an interval is filled with auditory flutter. Participants reproduced flutter-filled and empty durations while electrophysiological activity was recorded. As expected, participants over-produced durations when they were filled with auditory flutter rather than unfilled.

Can't catch the beat: Failure to find simple repetition effects in three types of temporal judgements.

More experience results in better performance, usually. In most tasks, the more chances to learn we have, the better we are at it. This does not always appear to be the case in time perception however.

The Dawn of the Study of Motor Timing: Wilhelm Camerer (1866) and Karl von Vierordt (1868) on the Time Course of Voluntary Movements.

This article discusses material from the doctoral thesis of Wilhlem Camerer, which was devoted to the topic of the timing of voluntary movements, and appeared in 1866, thus being one of the earliest studies of any aspect of time perception. It was conducted under the supervision of Karl von Vierordt, at the University of Tübingen in Germany. The data reported come from Camerer's attempts to make a movement over a distance of about 65 mm, either by flexion or extension of his arm, with the behavior recorded via a kymograph, and measured from its trace.

Short-term effects on temporal judgement: Sequential drivers of interval bisection and reproduction.

Our prior experiences provide the background with which we judge subsequent events. In the time perception literature one common finding is that providing participants with a higher percentage of a particular interval can skew judgment; intervals will appear longer if the distribution of intervals contains more short experiences. However, changing the distribution of intervals that participants witness also changes the short-term, interval-to-interval, sequence that participants experience.

Executive processes and timing: Comparing timing with and without reference memory.

Temporal perception is influenced by executive function. However, performance on different temporal tasks is often associated with different executive functions. This study examined whether using reference memory during a task influenced how performance was associated with executive resources.

Experience Sampling Methodology reveals similarities in the experience of passage of time in young and elderly adults.

Many people accept the idea that time seems to pass more quickly as they get older, as if this is a psychological reality. However, systematic investigations of differences in judgments of passage of time between young and elderly people are very rare and contradictory. The present study examined the experience of passage of time in daily life in young and elderly people using Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), with 8 alerts per day for 5 days being delivered by smartphones.

The differential contribution of executive functions to temporal generalisation, reproduction and verbal estimation.

Evidence from dual-task studies suggests that executive resources are recruited during timing. However, there has been little exploration of whether executive recruitment is universal across temporal tasks, or whether different temporal tasks recruit different executive resources. The current study explored this further by examining how individual differences in updating, switching, inhibition and access affected performance on temporal generalisation, reproduction and verbal estimation tasks.

Females' duration estimates of briefly-viewed male, but not female, photographs depend on attractiveness.

We tested a prediction that females' duration estimates of briefly-viewed male, but not female, photos would be modulated by attractiveness. Twenty-seven female participants viewed sequences of five stimuli of identical duration in which the first four were sine-wave gratings (Gabor discs) and the fifth was either the same sine-wave grating (control trials) or a photo of an attractive or unattractive male or female (test trials). After each sequence, participants had to reproduce the duration of the fifth stimulus.

Interference between auditory and visual duration judgements suggests a common code for time.

Auditory stimuli usually have longer subjective durations than visual ones for the same real duration, although performance on many timing tasks is similar in form with different modalities. One suggestion is that auditory and visual stimuli are initially timed by different mechanisms, but later converted into some common duration code which is amodal. The present study investigated this using a temporal generalization interference paradigm.

The cognitive neuroscience of time perception: how psychological studies might help to dissect the timing system.

It is argued that the cognitive neuroscience of time perception does not make sufficient use of a range of experimental techniques and theoretical approaches which might be useful in "dissecting" the human timing system, and thus helping to uncover its neural basis. These techniques are mostly inspired by scalar expectancy theory, but do not depend on acceptance of that model. Most of the methods result in the same physical stimuli giving rise to systematically different time judgements, thus they avoid problems of control which have haunted some areas of the cognitive neuroscience of timing.

Explaining between-group differences in performance on timing tasks.

The article discusses interpretation of between-group differences in performance on timing tasks. First, it is shown that differences in internal clock "pacemaker speed" cannot normally be used as a coherent explanation of obtained effects, even if such differences in pacemaker speed exist. Secondly, it is shown how, in theory, modelling of performance on commonly used timing tasks like bisection and temporal generalization can illuminate between-group effects.

More consistent, yet less sensitive: interval timing in autism spectrum disorders.

Even though phenomenological observations and anecdotal reports suggest atypical time processing in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), very few psychophysical studies have investigated interval timing, and the obtained results are contradictory. The present study aimed to clarify which timing processes function atypically in ASD and whether they are related to the ASD diagnostic profile. Visual, auditory, and cross-modal interval timing was assessed in 18 individuals with ASD using a repeated standards version of the temporal generalization task.

Perception of short time scale intervals in a hypnotic virtuoso.

Previous studies showed that hypnotized individuals underestimate temporal intervals in the range of several seconds to tens of minutes. However, no previous work has investigated whether duration perception is equally disorderly when shorter time intervals are probed. In this study, duration perception of a hypnotic virtuoso was tested using repeated standard temporal generalization and duration estimation tasks.

The effect of alcohol administration on human timing: a comparison of prospective timing, retrospective timing and passage of time judgements.

Previous research suggests that human timing may be affected by alcohol administration. The current study aimed to expand on previous research by examining the effect of alcohol on prospective timing, retrospective timing and passage of time judgements. A blind between-subjects design was employed in which participants were either administered 0 g of alcohol per kilogramme of body weight (placebo), 0.

Why do temporal generalization gradients change when people make decisions as quickly as possible?

Three experiments investigated temporal generalization performance under conditions in which participants were instructed to make their decisions as quickly as possible (speed), or were allowed to take their time (accuracy). A previous study (Klapproth & Müller, 2008) had shown that under speeded conditions people were more likely to confuse durations shorter than the standard with the standard than in the accuracy conditions, and a possible explanation of this result is that longer stimulus durations are "truncated" (i.e.

Psychophysical assessment of timing in individuals with autism.

Perception of time, in the seconds to minutes range, is not well characterized in autism. The required interval timing system (ITS) develops at the same stages during infancy as communication, social reciprocity, and other cognitive and behavioral functions. The authors used two versions of a temporal bisection procedure to study the perception of duration in individuals with autism and observed quantifiable differences and characteristic patterns in participants' timing functions.

Click trains and the rate of information processing: does "speeding up" subjective time make other psychological processes run faster?

A series of experiments demonstrated that a 5-s train of clicks that have been shown in previous studies to increase the subjective duration of tones they precede (in a manner consistent with "speeding up" timing processes) could also have an effect on information-processing rate. Experiments used studies of simple and choice reaction time (Experiment 1), or mental arithmetic (Experiment 2). In general, preceding trials by clicks made response times significantly shorter than those for trials without clicks, but white noise had no effects on response times.

Stimulus intensity and the perception of duration.

This article explores the widely reported finding that the subjective duration of a stimulus is positively related to its magnitude. In Experiments 1 and 2 we show that, for both auditory and visual stimuli, the effect of stimulus magnitude on the perception of duration depends upon the background: Against a high intensity background, weak stimuli are judged to last longer. In Experiment 3 we show that the effect of intensity becomes more pronounced at longer durations, consistent with the idea that stimulus intensity affects the pacemaker component of an internal clock, and that it is the difference of a stimulus from the background, rather than its absolute magnitude, which influences the rate of the pacemaker.

Are memories for duration modality specific?

Four experiments examined the effects of encoding multiple standards in a temporal generalization task in the visual and auditory modalities both singly and cross-modally, using stimulus durations ranging, across different experiments, from 100 to 1,400 ms. Previous work has shown that encoding and storing multiple auditory standards of different durations resulted in systematic interference with the memory of the standard, characterized by a shift in the location of peak responding, and this result, from Ogden, Wearden, and Jones (2008), was replicated in the present Experiment 1. Experiment 2 employed the basic procedure of Ogden et al.

Effect of click trains on duration estimates by people with Parkinson's disease.

Patients with a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and age- and IQ-matched controls estimated the duration of short 500-Hz tones (325-1,225 ms), on trials where the tone was either preceded by 3 s of 5-Hz clicks, or presented without clicks. The click manipulation had been shown in earlier studies with student participants to make verbal estimates longer. Patients were tested both on and off their dopaminergic medication, and controls were also tested in two sessions.

Internal clock processes and the filled-duration illusion.

In 3 experiments, the authors compared duration judgments of filled stimuli (tones) with unfilled ones (intervals defined by clicks or gaps in tones). Temporal generalization procedures (Experiment 1) and verbal estimation procedures (Experiments 2 and 3) all showed that subjective durations of the tones were considerably longer than those of unfilled intervals defined either by clicks or gaps, with the unfilled intervals being judged as approximately 55%-65% of the duration of the filled ones when real duration was the same. Analyses derived from the pacemaker-switch-accumulator clock model incorporated into scalar timing theory suggested that the filled/unfilled difference in mean estimates was due to higher pacemaker speed in the former case, although conclusively ruling out alternative interpretations in terms of attention remains difficult.

Decision processes in models of timing.

The article discusses the role played by decision mechanisms in the leading model of timing, scalar expectancy theory. Examples of the roles played by decision mechanisms in explanations of behaviour on temporal generalization and bisection are presented. Decision mechanisms for different timing tasks often have a common form (thresholded normalized difference, TND), where differences between durations are "normalized" (i.