Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom.
Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2022 Jul 7;18(7):e1010223. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010223. eCollection 2022 Jul.
Human experience of time exhibits systematic, context-dependent deviations from clock time; for example, time is experienced differently at work than on holiday. Here we test the proposal that differences from clock time in subjective experience of time arise because time estimates are constructed by accumulating the same quantity that guides perception: salient events. Healthy human participants watched naturalistic, silent videos of up to 24 seconds in duration and estimated their duration while fMRI was acquired. We were able to reconstruct trial-by-trial biases in participants' duration reports, which reflect subjective experience of duration, purely from salient events in their visual cortex BOLD activity. By contrast, salient events in neither of two control regions-auditory and somatosensory cortex-were predictive of duration biases. These results held despite being able to (trivially) predict clock time from all three brain areas. Our results reveal that the information arising during perceptual processing of a dynamic environment provides a sufficient basis for reconstructing human subjective time duration.
人类对时间的体验表现出系统的、依赖于情境的偏离时钟时间的现象；例如，工作时的时间体验与假期时不同。在这里，我们测试了这样一种假设，即主观时间体验与时钟时间的差异是因为时间估计是通过积累引导感知的相同数量的事件来构建的：显著事件。健康的人类参与者观看了长达 24 秒的自然主义、无声视频，并在 fMRI 采集的同时估计了视频的时长。我们能够从参与者视觉皮层 BOLD 活动中的显著事件中，重建参与者时长报告中的逐次偏差，这些偏差反映了时长的主观体验。相比之下，在听觉和躯体感觉皮层这两个控制区域中的任何一个区域的显著事件，都不能预测时长偏差。尽管我们可以（轻而易举地）从这三个脑区来预测时钟时间，但这些结果仍然成立。我们的研究结果表明，在动态环境的感知处理过程中产生的信息，为重建人类主观时间长度提供了充分的依据。
