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Key research themes
1. How does human time perception influence delay-discounting and intertemporal choice behavior?
This research area explores the relationship between individual differences in time perception (such as internal clock speed) and choices involving delayed rewards, focusing on how subjective temporal processing affects impulsivity and valuation of delayed outcomes. Understanding this link informs models of decision making in economics, neuroscience, and psychology, providing deeper explanations beyond self-control and reward evaluation frameworks.
Key finding: Lukinova and Erlich show that individual differences in internal clock speed partially explain unexplained variance in choices involving short, experienced delays (seconds-to-minutes range) but have nominal effects on long... Read more
Key finding: Droit-Volet and Wearden demonstrate that participants under experimentally induced time pressure overestimate short and medium durations (30s, 60s, 90s) in both verbal estimation and production tasks. This temporal... Read more
Key finding: Engbert et al. identify a critical methodological confound in Libet clock paradigms commonly used to measure temporal binding, showing that attentional redirection during action-effect sequences can alternatively explain... Read more
Key finding: This review clarifies distinctions between prospective and retrospective timing tasks and their underlying cognitive mechanisms, emphasizing that attention and memory processes differentially influence subjective time... Read more
Key finding: Killeen and Fetterman provide computational simulation evidence that timing behavior can emerge from reinforcement-driven actions on neural circuits without requiring an explicit internal clock or pacemaker. This challenges... Read more
2. What are the mechanisms and adaptability of sensorimotor delay compensation and the sense of agency in relation to time delays in action-feedback loops?
This theme examines how humans perceive temporal delays between their actions and sensory feedback, how such delays affect the sense of agency, and the neural and behavioral plasticity enabling compensation for altered feedback timings. Understanding these mechanisms is critical for models of motor control, timing perception, and the neurocognitive basis of agency, with applications ranging from human-computer interaction to understanding sensorimotor integration disorders.
Key finding: Herzfeld et al. review evidence that sensorimotor delay compensation is behaviorally trainable and sensitive to volition, showing asymmetric temporal windows for perceived causality where actions reliably precede sensory... Read more
Key finding: Engbert et al. find that attentional redirection during action-effect sequences biases temporal binding measures, suggesting that temporal perception distortions linked with agency may partly arise from attentional mechanisms... Read more
Key finding: Toaldo et al. mathematically characterize how subordinated time-changes affect process lifetimes, revealing that inverses of subordinators do not always result in delayed dynamics and subordinators do not always imply rushed... Read more
3. How do real-time delay announcements and explicit signaling of delays affect decision making, behavior, and satisfaction in competitive or applied contexts?
This area addresses practical effects of delay information dissemination on systems where users or customers make timing-sensitive decisions, such as healthcare or service industries, and on subjects like animal choice behavior where signaling temporal information influences preferences. Studying these influences reveals how delay knowledge alters decision strategies, market competition, and subjective experiences of waiting or reward anticipation.
Key finding: Wang and Padman model service providers competing over delay-sensitive customers and find that in equilibrium typically both announce real-time delay information, benefitting especially the lower-capacity providers under... Read more
Key finding: González et al. reveal that pigeons prefer informative options signaling delay durations over non-informative ones, and this preference intensifies with increased disparity between short and long delays. This supports... Read more
Key finding: Muhammad et al. empirically show that, despite an average clinic waiting time of 315 minutes, patient satisfaction does not significantly decline with waiting time alone, as other factors including demographics and service... Read more