Psychology and Time

The Experience of Time

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine thus concludes his analysis of the experience of time: “It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times.” He saw the perception of time as constructed by our self; that is, the experience of time represents the mental status of the beholder, reflecting one's cognitive state and emotional well-being. The accuracy and precision of subjective time estimation is linked to overall cognitive functioning, that is, to attention and memory [Page 1058]processes. Our sense of duration depends on the degree of attention we pay to the passage of time and memories of comparable time intervals. Our subjective well-being also strongly influences how time is experienced. Time seems to fly during pleasant activities, but to drag during periods of mental distress. Our sense of time depends on an intricate interplay between specific cognitive functions and influences of our momentary mood states.

The perception of time can be classified in numerous ways, but two concepts form the building blocks of our temporal experiences—succession and duration. The perception of succession refers to the sequential characteristics of events; in other words, their temporal order. The perception of duration refers to the time interval subjectively experienced between two events or to the persistence of an event over time. The taxonomy of elementary temporal experiences derives from these two basic concepts and comprises the perceptual phenomena of simultaneity, successiveness, temporal order, the subjective present, and duration.

The first three of these experiences relate to the temporal properties of two events that are perceived as happening simultaneously or nonsimul-taneously. For instance, our sensory systems have different temporal resolutions for the detection of nonsimultaneity. The highest temporal resolution (the lowest threshold of detection) is observed in the auditory system, where acoustic events 2 to 3 milliseconds apart are detected as nonsimultane-ous. The somatosensory system has a slightly higher threshold, whereas the visual system has the lowest temporal resolution, with a threshold approximating 20 milliseconds. Interestingly, the detection of nonsimultaneity of stimuli is not perceptually sufficient to indicate their temporal order. Although we may be aware that two events did not occur simultaneously, we are still unable to tell which one of the two events occurred first.

The temporal-order threshold is more comparable across senses. The onset of two events, independent of sensory modalities, must be at least 20 to 40 milliseconds apart before an observer can reliably indicate their temporal order. The temporal-order threshold thus represents a fundamental perceptual limit. The temporal succession of events over time (the order in which they occur) can only be perceived if they occur approximately 20 to 30 milliseconds apart.

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