Editorial overview: Time in perception and action

A New York Academy of Sciences conference organized by John Gibbon and Lorraine Allan in 1983, with the subsequent volume Timing and Time Perception [1], was pivotal in bringing together researchers from many disciplines who shared a common interest in temporal processing. Over the past three decades the field has grown substantially, with significant advances arising from human and animal research, employing the full range of methods in cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, and computational modeling. Many research groups have pursued the ‘Holy Grail’ for this field, what Matt Matell has referred to as ‘‘the neural structures, activity patterns, and computational processes that serve as the ‘internal clock’’’ [2] — p. 209. Others have pushed in a different direction, arguing that the concept of an internal clock is misleading, emphasized instead that we need to appreciate how temporal processing is an emergent property of neural dynamics and state representations of temporal patterns [3]. The aperture of the ‘timing’ spotlight has also increased in interesting and unexpected ways, moving well beyond tasks that examined how well people perceive and produce intervals. Timing research now encompass a diverse set of tasks: Behavioral studies look at questions such as how attention entails temporal predictability or how time is distorted in multisensory integration. Physiological methods are employed to ask how time may be encoded in the ramping activity of neurons or to ask how temporal representation may emerge through the entrainment and coincidence detection of patterns of endogenous oscillations.