Sensory augmentation offers a novel opportunity to broaden our knowledge of human perception through the use of external sensors that record information that humans cannot perceive naturally. This information is then translated in a meaningful way to be presented through an inherent sensory modality. To assess whether such augmented senses affect the acquisition of spatial knowledge during navigation, we trained a group of 26 participants for six weeks with an augmented sense for cardinal directions, called the feelSpace belt. In order to assess perceptual and behavioral changes, we compared the use of spatial strategies and the spatial navigation performance of the belt group to the performance of a control group that did not receive the augmented sense or the training. To this end, all participants explored the virtual reality environment Westbrook for 150 minutes in total. Then, the participants’ spatial knowledge of the virtual reality city was assessed subjectively with the FRS questionnaire and behaviorally in four immersive virtual reality tasks within Westbrook. The belt group reported a significant increase in the use of spatial strategies after training, while the groups’ ratings were comparable at baseline. The finding is consistent with previous studies showing cognitive and subjective changes to space perception as a consequence of wearing the feelSpace belt for an extended time period. Behaviorally, we found that the belt group acquired significantly more accurate knowledge of cardinal directions and of survey knowledge, measured in pointing accuracy, distance and rotation estimates. Finally, we found that the augmented sense also positively affects route knowledge but to a lesser degree. These results suggest that six weeks of training with the feelSpace belt lead to an improved acquisition of survey and route knowledge as reflected by an increased accuracy in survey and route knowledge tasks in a virtual city.

Based on recent conceptual and empirical findings a framework is presented suggesting that physiological changes of the body, the basis of our feeling states, form an internal signal to encode the duration of external events. Neuroimaging studies have shown how increasing neural activity in the posterior insular cortex is related to the processing of temporal intervals in the multiple-seconds range. Given the close connection between the insula and ascending body signals, it is possible that the accumulation of physiological changes over time constitutes our experience of duration. On a basic level, the bodily self, as created by the continuous input from the body, is the functional anchor of phenomenal self-awareness – and of subjective time. The entanglement of self-reflective consciousness, emotion and body awareness with the experience of time is prominently disclosed in altered states of consciousness such as in experiences of flow and of boredom, in meditative states, in floatation-REST, and under the influence of psychedelics. In such altered states of consciousness peak experiences can occur which later are described as culminating in the feeling of ‘selflessness’ and ‘timelessness’. This body of work on the intricate relationship between the self and time will be discussed for an understanding of everyday time experience as well as of altered states of consciousness.

Apparent motion perception is one of the often discussed visual illusions among philosophers that a subject perceives stationary stimuli as if dynamic. It might be one exceptional case indicates some discrepancy between subject time and event time. Yet more worry arises if one and the same neural mechanism underlies apparent and real motion. How can we distinguish real motion from apparent motion? One way to settle this problem is to differentiate the perceptual content at the neural level from that at the higher level. Specifically, I assign motion perception to the embodiment level with respect to its short timescale less than 1 minute where preconscious action-guiding perception takes place. Thus, I will suggest that suitably short stimuli duration and short interstimuli interval are sufficient for motion processing at the neural level, but not for motion perception at the embodiment level. For fixing perceptual content at the embodiment level requires implicit and preconscious examination by self-motion, which we are always doing while perceiving something.

A key distinction in the study of duration processing concerns whether elapsing time is explicitly attended to (prospective timing), or time becomes the focus of attention only after it has elapsed (retrospective timing). Prospective timing depends on the activity of a distributed network, that involves primary sensory, motor and premotor regions, as well as the inferior frontal and posterior parietal cortex, the striatum and the insula. Within this network, however, different brain regions may be recruited according to task demands and contextual features. Retrospective timing, instead, has been crucially linked to episodic memory, and proposed to depend on the retrieval of contextual information automatically encoded in medial temporal lobe regions. A series of studies will be presented exploiting individual differences in behavior and brain functioning, as well as evidence from neuropsychological models, in order to understand the interplay between endogenous and environmental factors in prospective timing, and to better characterize brain mechanisms supporting retrospective timing. Results suggest that prospectively tracking time without external cues not only involves the integration of psychophysiological changes in the right insula, but is also affected by stable dimensions of individual functioning such as cognitive style; also, prospective temporal learning with or without external cues appears to be differentially affected along the spectrum of Alzheimer’s Disease, in line with the possibility that different mechanisms support prospective timing depending on whether external cues are available to track time. Finally, results provide preliminary evidence that retrospective timing may involve an interaction between the medial temporal lobe and sensorimotor regions, and that alterations in this process may be detected also in preclinical stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. Taken together these findings provide new insights on neural and cognitive mechanisms supporting duration processing.

Psychological moments are subjective temporal integration windows, unified periods of perception, cognition, and action. By organizing the information we receive from our senses, they play a crucial role in shaping our experience of the world. While different notions of psychological moments originate from empirical research, they have also been suggested to be consistent with the notion of the specious present in retentionalism and extensionalism. In this talk, I challenge such suggestions and the relevance of psychological moments for the debate over the theories of time consciousness.

A common colloquialism is that “Timing is everything.”  Estimating and discriminating between different durations of time is central to numerous mental processes including sensory perception, attention, action planning, and decision-making. In this presentation, we will explore how interval timing influences our perception and beliefs of the world around us, and in turn, how individual differences affect the ability to process time.  We will draw from empirical findings collected in the lab relating time perception to other cognitive processes (e.g., spatial cognition, decision making), health-related functions (e.g., eating behaviors), and personal beliefs (e.g., the philosophical notions of agency and free will).  We will also survey how individual differences and personality traits (e.g., impulsivity and depression) affect interval timing, particularly the monitoring and correction of temporal errors. Collectively, these samples of findings illustrate that interval timing is crucial and relevant to much of what we do, enriching our life experiences.

There has been a proliferation in work on the topic of 'temporal experience' in philosophy recently. Two explananda that this work has sought to address are humans' very ability to perceive instances of movement and change, and what is sometimes referred to as the 'dynamic' aspect of humans' experience of time, captured in the idea of the flow or passage of time. Looking back at some influential remarks by William James and Edmund Husserl, I suggest that – perhaps despite what the two authors themselves thought – these are indeed two quite distinct explananda, each calling for its own explanation. I connect this to the relevance of the idea of a 'specious present' as well as to the idea of a 'temporal point of view', and especially the role of agency in the latter.

Psychological and neuroscientific studies show that human temporal perception can be shaped by different psychological reasons such as perceptual contexts, physiological processes, and psychological or emotional states. The main purpose of our presentation is to bring a socio-geographical perspective to this discussion and show how a position within national power geometry affects the time perception of individuals. Based on the data from the interviews and participant observation in two cities in the Far East of Russia, we will demonstrate how the necessity to deal with the time difference of 7-8 hours with Russia’s capital Moscow shapes the everyday timing practices and mental processes of Far-Eastern citizens.

Russia is a territorially vast yet highly centralised state, and Moscow, where most government and business decisions are made, is located in the west. Also, the majority of the country’s population lives in the Moscow time zone (UTC+3), though many migrants from the eastern regions keep alive their connections with relatives and friends from the origin area. Thus, the Moscow time serves as a default time for many people living to the east of the capital. The synchronous telecommunications development and digitalisation of economy and governance in the last decades have made dealing with two time zones, the local and the Moscow, a routine matter for them. In our talk, we will analyse the everyday timing practices of dwellers of the cities of Vladivostok (UTC+10, MSK+7) and Magadan (UTC+11, MSK+8), such as time calculation and switching between times of two time zones. We will also show the dynamic nature of these skills, which can be acquired or lost when a person changes their position within the Russian spatiotemporal structure.

In our talk, we will rely on the theoretical framework of “power-geometry” by a feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1993) who emphasised the situatedness of the “time-space compression” experience in the networked society. The concept of “national power-geometry” will be used to point out the intra-state hierarchy in relation to information and mobility flows emerging due to the combination of the centralised power structure and vast geography.

Of the supposed two “header” choices on philosophical perspectives on time, the presentist theory is often touted as the more intuitive choice, integrating the perception of presence and flow of time that eternalist theories lack. Here I hope to argue that this intuitive upper hand is in fact illusory, and that presentist theories of time are necessitated to move away from the intuitive perception of time through an inverse of the holism of eternalism- that is, through temporal reductionism. I further argue that the recognition of this sets forth not only the quantal nature of perceived time, but the cognitive actions of division and combination, which gain different characters in the differently charged ontological commitments of holism and reductionism. It is through an ecumenical approach to this division that this expanded temporal realm can be understood as a potentiality of these actions, each equally ontically privileged.