High Precision Mental Timing and Geissler's Taxonomic Model: Experimental Results and Modeling

Various psychophysical findings suggest the existence of a common framework of distinguished temporal intervals in human perception and cognition. The corresponding experimental paradigms include the study of periodic and simple sequential stimuli in different modalities, e.g. by determining perceptual thresholds or examining the influence of temporal parameters on the resulting percepts, the study of latencies in simple and complex recognition as well as the investigation of human time perception and duration discrimination. The determined time intervals exhibit a structure of nearly rational or integer size relations. In agreement with Geisslers (1985, 1992) taxonomic model this regularity can be expressed by the representation of these intervals as multiples of a quantum of about 4.5 msec. In my talk I will present a neurophysiological principle of discrete mental timing which relates to the concept of synfire chains (Abeles et al.,1993). In this scheme, interaction of precisely timed neural delays with oscillations in neural feature maps constrains the delays to simple rational size relations. On such a basis, various psychophysical findings on discrete timing, including quantization, are linked to recent neurophysiological results.