Brandon, you might be interested in the surprisingly low information rate of learning novel information (a few tens of bits per second maximum). This would suggest that we retrospectively construct an internal narrative that makes sense of sensations. In addition, the briefest glance can capture around 50 bits of information that is subsequently processed and memorised.

http://www.humanbottleneck.com/index/chapter-extras/chapter-5/

http://www.humanbottleneck.com/index/images/nggallery/image/25

Dear Brandon,

Your question is very interesting. Time management by the central nervous system, can explain this that you're suggesting, that is, the structural memory as the element that leaves record of all our experience. To extend this answer, I suggest you read in my book PSYCHE (available in RG), Chapter 1, p. 65; in Chapter 2, p. 100 et seq .; in Chapter 5, pp. 139-154.

Interesting issue. But the perspective from which time is viewed is likely to be critical. We normally think of time as absolute (defined in terms clock ticks or pulses of a Caesium atom), although it turns out to be relative. More important still is that from the organism's point of view,things are likely to be even more flexible, and related to ongoing behaviours and priorities - time slowing when we're bored etc. One way into this is the literature on our ability to sense and measure the flow of time relative to an "asolute" standard, which has also been linked to motion processing and trajectory calculation in vision. There's also the literature on foreperiod effects which related the passage of time to stimulus occurence via hazard function.

Hahaha... To me the question is interesting because it is non-sense : you need memory to perceive.

The way you perceive stimuli is deeply shaped by your past experience of the world, and one could say that a "naked eye" could not make sense of the world. Related to this there is an interesting paper (Called "There is no naked eye") which points at this aspect regarding the visual perception. But the same applies for every modality.

We do not perceive the world the way it is, but the way we are used to perceive it...

http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/proceedings/2003/pdfs/42.pdf

Hi Brandon,

There is something about the irrevesibility of action that could serve as "ticking of the clock" so time would be linked to subjective action-in-the-world time. This of course gets complicated because we (here and now) are engaged simultaneously in many projects unfolding on many time-scales.

But your question about timescales goes deeper than on-line behaviour: e.g., Gibson, as I understand, pointed to the fact that in order to perceive our senses have to be tuned in evolution to certain properties of environment (become perceptual systems); then, inevitably, they are fine-tuned also in the time-scale of development, experience etc. So this is another way to answer "where perception begins", or which time-scales are important for it. I would recommend a very good paper by Gibson, 1960 The concept of the stimulus in psychology,

Sorry, no easy answer here. But I doubt you expected an easy one :)

Best,

Joanna

ps. for time-scales for understanding language, you can see:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262733468_Multiple_Systems_and_Multiple_Time_Scales_of_Language_Dynamics_Coping_with_Complexity

Article Multiple Systems and Multiple Time Scales of Language Dynami...

Thank you for your thoughtful insights! I look forward to looking at these papers. The question is not so much in regards to whether past experience is necessary to perceive (which is an epistemological question). But rather, what are the ontological assumptions about time that most adequately accommodate experience?

Certainly, the answer to this question will be largely constrained by epistemological considerations. For instance, as Paul suggests, we might find clues about it in the perception of motion from a perceiver’s frame of reference…by the way, do you have any recommendations within this literature?

A scientist will classify experience (memory, perception, planning, etc.) very differently depending on whether he/she assumes the relevant timescale(s) to be that of nervous system activity (thank you Dante!) vs. that of goal-directed actions or even the course of development (thank you Joanna!). Is there a principled account of time (extant or yet to be proposed) that enables the psychologist to classify (or perhaps declassify!) experience?  

P.S. It is too bad that it’s not easy!!!

Hi, I think that perception ends after 200-500 ms, the stimulus is gone, what comes next is the memory (see, eg, Howes, MB (2007). Human memory ..

At first it's sensory memory, then go down in short-term memory (working memory), and finally passes into long-term memory, or disappear.

Thanks for your contribution to this thread, Alfredo. I believe that this account (along the lines of the Atkinson-Shiffrin multi-store model of memory) provides an important perspective on this discussion. Thus conceived, time is parsed relative to the duration of a CNS response to a stimulus.

While this is perfectly reasonable and has led to immense productivity in our field, I still wonder whether there is a more lucrative description of time for psychology. After all, there is a paucity of meaningful aspects of experience that last a mere 500 ms. Most of our psychophysical experiments (purportedly testing perception) require participants to report on stimuli within a much longer time frame. This stimulus duration is not even long enough to control actions without the use of simulated feedback. Are we really capturing perception within this reference frame?

I am hoping we can find a definition of time that lawfully captures the regularities of experience. If physicists and cosmologists can use models of time and space to capture fundamental regularities in the universe, can psychologists hope to do the same?  

Brandon, you might be interested in the surprisingly low information rate of learning novel information (a few tens of bits per second maximum). This would suggest that we retrospectively construct an internal narrative that makes sense of sensations. In addition, the briefest glance can capture around 50 bits of information that is subsequently processed and memorised.

http://www.humanbottleneck.com/index/chapter-extras/chapter-5/

http://www.humanbottleneck.com/index/images/nggallery/image/25

Hi Brandon,

I (am an interested physicist :)) tell you that for words, digits and other symbolic stuff it is less than 0,3 sec BUT for complex image scenes (faces, landscapes, cities) it lasts for about 10 sec! The last facts are described in the Russian work:

Velichkovsky B. M., K. D. Schmidt, Perceptual long-range memory, Vestnik of Moscow State University, Psychology series 14, #1, pp.35-44 (1977)

Prof. Velichkovsky is now working in Dresden University.