In recent years, investigations into the psychological experience of time have rapidly accelerated. The experience of time could depend on a ticking internal clock or rely on contextual changes within and between events. Cognitive theories of memory propose that the presence of event boundaries, as defined by unexpected changes, is crucial for the segmentation of sequenced content and...
In this viewpoint article, Zhuanghua Shi and Virginie van Wassenhove discuss the past, present, and future of multisensory time perception. Drawing on decades of research, they argue that the field has undergone an important shift from the centralized internal clock toward timing as an active inference process. This framework, rooted in Bayesian models and predictive coding, suggests that our...
Across species, neurons track time over the course of seconds to minutes, which may feed the sense of time passing. Here, we asked whether neural signatures of time-tracking could be found in humans. Participants stayed quietly awake for a few minutes while being recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG). They were unaware they would be asked how long the recording lasted (retrospective time)...