Attention Does Not Affect the Speed of Subjective Time, but Whether Temporal Information Guides Performance: A Large-Scale Study of Intrinsically Motivated Timers in a Real-Time Strategy Game.

Many prepared actions have to be withheld for a certain amount of time in order to have the most beneficial outcome. Therefore, keeping track of time accurately is vital to using temporal regularities in our environment. Traditional theories assume that time is tracked by means of a clock and an "attentional gate" (AG) that modulates subjective time if not enough attentional resources are directed toward the temporal process.

Individual optimization of risky decisions in duration and distance estimations.

Many everyday decisions require an accurate perception of how much time has passed since a previous event. Although humans estimate time intervals with a high degree of mean accuracy, the precision of estimations varies greatly between individuals. In situations in which accurate timing is rewarded but responding too early is punished, the optimal amount of risk is directly dependent on the precision of the timer.

Core body temperature speeds up temporal processing and choice behavior under deadlines.

Evidence suggests that human timing ability is compromised by heat. In particular, some studies suggest that increasing body temperature speeds up an internal clock, resulting in faster time perception. However, the consequences of this speed-up for other cognitive processes remain unknown.

Neural markers of memory consolidation do not predict temporal estimates of encoded items.

In contrast to the paradigms used in most laboratory experiments on interval timing, everyday tasks often involve tracking multiple, concurrent intervals without an explicit starting signal. As these characteristics are problematic for most existing clock-based models of interval timing, here we explore an alternative notion that suggests that time perception and working memory encoding might be closely connected. In this integrative model, the consolidation of a new item in working memory initiates cortical oscillations that also signal the onset of a time interval.