Abstract
Most of the actions we carry out on a daily basis require timing on the scale of tens to hundreds of milliseconds. We must judge time to speak, to walk, to predict the interval between our actions and their effects, to determine causality and to decode information from our sensory receptors. However, the neural bases of time perception are largely unknown. Scattered confederacies of investigators have been interested in time for decades, but only in the past few years have new techniques been applied to old problems. Experimental psychology is discovering how animals perceive and encode temporal intervals, while physiology, fMRI and EEG unmask how neurons and brain regions underlie these computations in time. This symposium will capitalize on new breakthroughs, outlining the emerging picture and highlighting the remaining confusions about time in the brain. How do we encode and decode temporal information? How is information coming into different brain regions at different times synchronized? How plastic is time perception? How is it related to space perception? The experimental work of the speakers in this symposium will be shored together to understand how neural signals in different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world, and how this is related to the mechanisms of space perception. The speakers in this symposium are engaged in experiments at complementary levels of exploring sub-second timing and its relation to space.