Mental imagery unfolds at distinct timescales, with imagined contents being sluggish but more stable than visual perception. A large cohort (N = 827) completed six tasks recreating aspects of their imagination, revealing that temporal features of imagination can be accounted for by two factors: temporal ability and stability of mental imagery. Both imagination and perception share a common constraint: maintaining identically sized temporal windows of conscious experience.
Awareness of visual stimuli unfolds across multiple timescales, not just one. Using continuous flash suppression (CFS) with flicker rates of 1, 4, 10, and 25 Hz, four experiments with 48 participants showed that different flicker frequencies maximally disrupted distinct aspects of awareness: entry into awareness, attentional sampling, perceptual grouping, and exit from awareness each had a unique vulnerable flicker rate. These results suggest that temporal hierarchies in perception correspond to multiple timescales of conscious processing, challenging single-timescale theories of consciousness.
Integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness claims an identity between its causal structure and phenomenology, aiming to explain consciousness by prioritizing first-person experience. However, this critique argues that IIT's phenomenological analysis is incomplete because it overlooks temporality. The theory takes a non-identical illusionist stance towards experiences of continuity, flow, and extent, and isolates temporal grains to a single timescale, missing the multi-scale nested nature of temporal phenomena. The authors contend that IIT needs an axiom for time to refine its causal structure and account for temporal experiences, proposing such an axiom and discussing potential revisions to the theory.