The three-second 'subjective present': a critical review and a new proposal

摘要

It has been argued that there is a "subjective present" or "experienced moment" ofudabout three seconds in duration, involving automatic binding of events into perceptual unitsudon that time scale. Research on topics that have been taken as relevant to this proposal isudreviewed. The topics include accuracy in reproduction of stimulus durations, synchronizationudof behaviour with a regular beat, mental rhythmization of a regular beat, time units inudbehaviour, segmentation of observed behaviour into meaningful units, time scale of reversalsudof perception with bistable ambiguous figures, time scale of inhibition of return in visualudsearch, and EEG responses to deviant stimuli in series of repeating stimuli. Most of theudresearch findings were not consistent with the three-second window hypothesis. The smalludamount of supportive evidence is better interpreted as effects of specific processingudmechanisms, not as showing general temporal integration. The evidence shows that temporaludintegration occurs on multiple time scales and no particular duration is special, and thatudwindows of temporal integration are defined in terms of information density, not in terms ofudduration. The subjective present is constructed through local temporal integration on multipleudtime scales, further integrated into a coherent global representation of what is going on.