Time as its own representation? Exploring a link between timing of cognition and time perception

The way we represent and perceive time has crucial implications for studying temporality in conscious experience. Contrasting positions posit that temporal information is separately abstracted out like any other perceptual property, or that time is represented through representations having temporal properties themselves. To add to this debate, we investigated alterations in felt time in conditions where only conscious visual experience is altered while a bistable figure remains physically unchanged. In this talk, I will discuss two studies that we have done in relation to answering this question. In study 1, we investigated whether perceptual switches in fixed intervals altered felt time. In three experiments we showed that a break in visual experience (via a perceptual switch) also leads to a break in felt time. In study 2, we are currently looking at figure-ground perception in ambigous displays. Here, in experiment 1 we show that differences in flicker frequencies on ambigous regions can induce figure-ground segregation. To see if a reverse complementarity exists for felt time, we ask participants to view ambigous regions as figure/ground and show that they have different temporal resolutions for the same region based on whether it is seen as figure or background. Overall, the two studies provide evidence for temporal mirroring and isomorphism in visual experience, arguing for a link between the timing of experience and time perception.