The perception of silence.

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds-a friend's voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound-a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance. In these cases, do we positively hear silence? Or do we just fail to hear, and merely judge or infer that it is silent? This longstanding question remains controversial in both the philosophy and science of perception, with prominent theories holding that sounds are the only objects of auditory experience and thus that our encounter with silence is cognitive, not perceptual. However, this debate has largely remained theoretical, without a key empirical test. Here, we introduce an empirical approach to this theoretical dispute, presenting experimental evidence that silence can be genuinely perceived (not just cognitively inferred). We ask whether silences can "substitute" for sounds in event-based auditory illusions-empirical signatures of auditory event representation in which auditory events distort perceived duration. Seven experiments introduce three "silence illusions"-the one-silence-is-more illusion, silence-based warping, and the oddball-silence illusion-each adapted from a prominent perceptual illusion previously thought to arise only from sounds. Subjects were immersed in ambient noise interrupted by silences structurally identical to the sounds in the original illusions. In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to the illusions produced by sounds. Our results suggest that silence is truly heard, not merely inferred, introducing a general approach for studying the perception of absence.

Thinking about time: identifying prospective temporal illusions and their consequences.

Time is fundamentally abstract, making it difficult to conceptualize and vulnerable to mental distortions. Nine preregistered experiments identify temporal illusions that characterize prospective time judgments and corresponding consequences for decision making in a variety of domains. Using visual illusions as a grounding metaphor, studies 1-4 demonstrated that the temporal distance between two dates was perceived as closer together as those two dates were imagined further into the future (e.g., Vanishing Point); the length of a single day whether negative (e.g., a 12 h illness-Study 2a) or positive (e.g., 12 h with a good friend-Study 2b) was estimated to feel longer when embedded within a short versus long trip (e.g., the Delbouef Illusion); a 60 min activity was expected to go by more quickly when adjacent activities were 90 (vs. 30) min (e.g., Ebbinghaus Illusion); and a 9 + 1 day vacation was expected to be considerably lengthier than an 11-1 day vacation (e.g., Representational Momentum). Four additional studies explored moderating factors (Studies 5 and 6) and the impact of distortions on downstream non-time judgments including the forecasted emotional intensity of a negative event (Study 6), estimations of fair monetary compensation for lost time (Study 7), and willingness to make prosocial time commitments (Study 8). Implications for uncovering additional temporal illusions as well as practical applications for leveraging the relativity of prospective time to achieve desired cognitive and behavioral outcomes are discussed.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the flow of time.

Where does the study of the flow of time belong: physics, the cognitive sciences, philosophy, or somewhere else? Physicists and philosophers have set themselves up into two camps: those who believe there is genuine flow or becoming in the world and those who believe there is just a block of events. What had not been considered is whether the subjective feeling of flow of time is the same the world over, whether it could be tampered with by brain injury, or whether it is present at all developmental stages. We lay out the problem, explain terms, and provide synopses of relevant ideas.

Time Slows Down during Accidents.

The experienced speed of the passage of time is not constant as time can seem to fly or slow down depending on the circumstances we are in. Anecdotally accidents and other frightening events are extreme examples of the latter; people who have survived accidents often report altered phenomenology including how everything appeared to happen in slow motion. While the experienced phenomenology has been investigated, there are no explanations about how one can have these experiences. Instead, the only recently discussed explanation suggests that the anecdotal phenomenology is due to memory effects and hence not really experienced during the accidents. The purpose of this article is (i) to reintroduce the currently forgotten comprehensively altered phenomenology that some people experience during the accidents, (ii) to explain why the recent experiments fail to address the issue at hand, and (iii) to suggest a new framework to explain what happens when people report having experiences of time slowing down in these cases. According to the suggested framework, our cognitive processes become rapidly enhanced. As a result, the relation between the temporal properties of events in the external world and in internal states becomes distorted with the consequence of external world appearing to slow down. That is, the presented solution is a realist one in a sense that it maintains that sometimes people really do have experiences of time slowing down.