The Psychology of Human Temporality
by David Gilden
The book is essentially about a single observation, that there is a phase transition in our experience of time that occurs in the range of two to three seconds. The existence of this phase transition is obvious once it is pointed out, but what is obvious may be obscured from view by its very familiarity. Once pointed out, the first question to ask about it is why—why is there a phase transition? The answer seems to be that we are, in a technical but definite sense, forgetful and that it only takes a few seconds for the mind to relax and return to stillness. Then there is the question of why it only takes a few seconds and what those few seconds mean. The search for that meaning leads to the body. So, in a nutshell, the book is about how the body sets the stage for how much time it takes for the mind to find stillness.
Reviews
Bio
For the past 50 years David Gilden has been doing research. As an astronomer he became interested in fluid and gas dynamics, with a particular emphasis on gravitational, chemical, and thermal instabilities in explosive astrophysical events. This went on for about 10 years, first at the University of Texas where he got his PhD and then at the Institute for Advanced Study where he was a post-doctoral fellow. One thing led to another, and he eventually became an experimental psychologist—first in the lab of Dennis Proffitt at the University of Virginia, then as an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, and then back at the University of Texas where he has been a professor since 1992. His research has involved many of the principal areas that comprise cognitive psychology, including vision, audition, perception, attention, the imagination, memory, and reasoning. The last 10 years have been spent conducting experiments in perceptual organization and speech production to understand how time is expressed at the level of the individual. These experiments and their theoretical motivation led to the book featured here.
Articles
Articles about human temporality:
- Contraction of time in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Our research into human temporality began more or less accidentally as an outgrowth of some experiments we were conducting on adults with ADHD. A theory that ADHD is caused by dysregulation of the dopamine reward system led to us wondering if that dysregulation would lead to a general deficit in timing. In a first study we examined the conditions under which people both with and without ADHD can experience rhythmic pulse. We found that people with ADHD lose their sense of rhythm at slow tempi, about 40 bpm, where people without ADHD are able to keep some sense of pulse.
Read article - Assessing temporal integration spans in ADHD through apparent motion. Our second article on dopamine dysregulation examined the conditions under which people both with and without AHHD can experience apparent motion. Apparent motion is a type of hallucination where lights that blink on and off in sequence create a strong sense of motion along a path. Theater marquees are an example of apparent motion. We found that there are slow blink rates where people with ADHD completely lose the hallucination, conditions where people without ADHD are still experiencing a vivid hallucination.
Read article - Allometric scaling laws for temporal proximity in perceptual organization. A complicated title for a complicated article written for Psychological Review, the principal theory heavy journal in the field of psychology. This is the article that lays out the background research and theory that led to the book. But it goes further than the book. The book was limited to experiments on the feeling of rhythm, but the article also includes experiments on apparent motion. Not only does body size influence our capacity for experiencing rhythm, it also influences the circumstances when we perceive motion. None of the experiment descriptions are terribly technical and may be read and understood by anybody with the motivation to do so.
Read article - Laws for pauses. This article lays out the theory and experiments that led to Chapter 10 where the feeling of time is described. The experiments conducted in this article involved nothing more than asking people to read from given texts or speak freely on preassigned topics. We found that people broadcast their height through the pauses that proliferate through ordinary speech.
Read article - More laws for pauses: replication and generalization. It happens that the findings in Laws for Pauses are controversial. Linguists have been studying speech for about 80 years and there has never been a hint that tall people speak differently than short people in any systematic way. A novel finding may well fail to replicate simply because it is not deeply tethered to what is known and accepted. In this first attempt at replication, we analyzed pauses taken from YouTube interviews with top athletes. The data was clear, tall athletes take longer pauses in natural speech than do shorter athletes—irrespective of gender.
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Since the book was written the issue of replication has continued to be a concern. In a last article we describe two independent studies of celebrity interviews; one conducted at Texas and the other conducted at Florida State University. Our study is included in Chapter 10, and the FSU study will appear here following peer review.
Articles about 1/f noise:
1/f noise is a mysterious signal that is quite rare in nature but still manages to be ubiquitous. It is found in quasar light, river heights, music performance, heartbeat rhythm, …, and it also pervades human behavior. We were the first group to discover 1/f noise in behavior, but it is now a well-established phenomenon. There is no settled understanding of what 1/f noise signifies, but it seems to be associated with the way complex systems are organized. Here are some of the articles we wrote on this subject.
- 1/f noise in human cognition. The first appearance of 1/f noise in behavior. We discovered it in the way people make temporal and spatial intervals.
Read article - Fluctuations in the time required for elementary decisions. Cognitive psychology has largely been built by measuring how long it takes people to look at things and make rapid decisions about what they see. What is measured is the response time, how long it takes to make a decision, and the accuracy with which decisions are made. There are thousands of such studies and consequently there are reams of response times. We gathered samples of some response times and found that they contained 1/f noise. Lots of 1/f noise. Eventually we concluded that we made this discovery simply because 1/f noise is so prevalent that it would have been difficult to not find.
Read article - Cognitive emissions of 1/f noise. This is a long article summarizing everything we learned about 1/f noise. There is no theory of 1/f noise in this article, but there is a wide range of phenomena presented that covers most of the ways in which behavior is observed in cognitive psychology.
Read article - Global model analysis of cognitive variability. This article grew out of a long running dispute with another research group about whether we were in fact looking at 1/f noise, or rather some other kind of signal that we were confusing with 1/f noise. In the course of this dispute, we came to appreciate that it is very difficult to answer questions of data interpretation when the data come from psychology experiments. And consequently, this is a very technical article that uses Bayesian statistics to decide the issue of model selection in favor of 1/f noise.
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News Story:
Timing is Everything. This is news story about the timing research in our lab written by a student reporter at the University of Texas (Jessica Sinn) and is intended for a general audience.
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