Shaping time through action learning

Timing permeates our daily experience. We extract temporal regularities to predict events, such as traffic light behaviour. We narrow down cause-effect relationships based on temporal proximity of events. Everyday behaviours, such as shaking hands or speaking, are possible because of accurate timing.

Despite its importance, timing is an elusive concept.

We lack a sensing organ for time (in the same way as we have eyes for detecting light), and there are no brain areas uniquely involved in its processing (in the same way as we have visual cortices for vision). Given these constraints, how does time perception arise in the brain? Converging evidence suggests a central role of action in enabling time perception.

Developmental studies suggest that timing is ‘acquired’ as children learn to interact with the environment.

Brain research indeed shows a considerable action/timing overlap, as timing computations are embedded in action control brain function.

Indeed, at its core, successful behaviour is all about timing: accurate timing is what separates successful actions such as shifting gears, from unsuccessful ones such as bumping into a car in front of us. Thus, timing might emerge from our ability of learning goal-directed behaviour.

We propose that the key to the time perception puzzle lies in formalizing this statement, by directly evaluating time perception in the context of goal-directed action learning.

We will causally establish how learning of goal-directed action features shapes our perception and neural processing of time.

This will be carried out across experiments requiring adults to simultaneously learn goal-directed actions and estimate the duration of visual stimuli, while recording electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of brain activity.

This project will spearhead a new cross-disciplinary approach merging timing and motor learning paradigms, with a significant impact on the way we think about and methodologically approach the study of time.