This proposal requests support for a conference on Timing and Time Perception to be held in New York in May, 1983, under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences. The study of timing and time perception has a venerable dual history. Animal psychologists studying learning and conditioning have extensively investigated the timing and temporal patterning of behavior under instrumental control. In the psychophysical tradition, the psychophysics of time perception in humans also had early attention within the classical study of the limits of human sensory capacity. The conference would bring workers from these two traditions together. The techniques and results in animal and human work have evolved and broadened in recent years so that currently there is a burgeoning literature in animal psychophysics dealing with temporal discrimination, and a burgeoning literature in human timing dealing with production and organization of temporal patterns. The techniques and results in contemporary animal and human work, however, have evolved separately, and are still rarely directly comparable so that the literatures are not commonly cross-cited. Recently, a body of theory which is stimulating considerable interest has developed in association with data drawn from both human and animal work (Allan, 1979; Gibbon, 1977, 1981b). These theoretical efforts share some common aims and sometimes common structures, and are less tied to particular methods of data collection, species, or experimental paradigms. They therefore allow a potential rapproachment between the two disciplines. The thrust of this conference would be to allow such integration of the two disciplines to begin. It would bring workers in both traditions toogether for the first time to speak to each other about their work in several areas that now contain overlapping concerns.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter