ABSTRACT
One problem with the psychological study of time is that time is not a single, unitary dimension. First, there is the physical time in which brain processes take place and in which we measure response latency (reaction time, or RT) or the latency of event-related potentials. This is time as defined by physics. Second, there is the concept of psychological time in the sense of a particular “fine structure” (Stroud, 1955) of processing in the brain, as suggested in Geissler’s theory of time quanta (e.g., Geissler, 1985, 1990). Third, there is phenomenal time—the dimension in which perceived events take place and which can be assessed by psychophysical methods such as temporal-order judgments (TOJs). In this chapter, we are concerned with two of these time dimensions, that is, the physical time in which processing takes place and the phenomenal time in which perceived events succeed each other. Both time dimensions have traditionally been used to estimate how long it takes a stimulus to cause a perception, a span variously called “sensory latency”, “perception time”, “sensation time”, or “perceptual lag” (Berger, 1886; Cattell, 1886; Exner, 1873, 1875; Hirsch, 1863; Szili, 1892; for surveys, see Jaskowski, 1996, 1999; Roufs, 1974). Interestingly, the results of these two research traditions do not converge.
