Timing is deeply rooted in human cognition and behaviour, providing the basis for our ability of comprehending speech, playing sports, and appreciating music. Despite lack of dedicated sensory and neural systems for time, people exhibit extraordinarily precise time estimation. Our sense of time is believed to leverage motor systems endowed with high temporal precision required for action control. This relationship is reflected in a large body of behavioural studies showing that time estimation is significantly distorted by action. However, this literature is represented by experimental approaches that overlook critical aspects of motor function. Actions are goal driven and control is gradually refined through learning, yet our understanding of how the motor system instantiates time stems from paradigms with ill-defined behavioural goals, and where timing operation is captured through static snapshots of average performance, not accounting for dynamic aspects of action learning, and the way these processes gradually shape timing.
This fundamental gap in the literature has motivated this Marie Curie IF project (Time in Action), aimed at understanding how timing is shaped in the visual domain during action planning, and critically how this relationship is modulated by goal driven motor control & motor learning processes. I have set up 3 experiments to meet these aims, combining perceptual judgements of duration, hand tracking and electroencephalographic measurements of brain activity (EEG), to understand how the brain constructs an understanding of time through action control, and what neural mechanisms underlie this process. Time in Action provides a paradigm shift in this literature by accounting for goal-driven action learning mechanisms that are central the motor system’s operation, and the way these processes dynamically shape our sense of time.
