Towards a taxonomy for visual time perception
Abstract
The investigation of visual time perception has uncovered a large variety of phenomena, but how these phenomena are related to each other is unclear. The ambition of the present review is to propose a principled way to class visual time phenomena into four clusters. We suggest that these four clusters result from four ultimate goals that the visual system is attempting to solve to stay well connected to our dynamic environment. These goals are to link successive events into an apparent continuous flow, to anticipate when forthcoming events will occur, to integrate sensory information to consolidate a sufficiently stable percept at each moment in time, and to hold on a perceived present so that it can be used to label events on a timeline. We then review twelve classic visual time phenomena and assign them to one of the four clusters. These twelve phenomena include four basic ones: temporal segmentation, temporal order, temporal integration, and subjective simultaneity. More complex phenomena include temporal continuity, the passage of time, perceived duration, anticipation, backward masking, postdiction, specious present, and perceived nowness. For each of the twelve phenomena, we also present the main methodologies that have been used to investigate them. Ultimately, identifying similarities and differences between visual time phenomena will advance our efforts to create a taxonomy of these phenomena.
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BibTeX
@misc{mamassian2026towards,
title = {{Towards a taxonomy for visual time perception}},
author = {Pascal Mamassian},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/zdt4c_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zdt4c_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Towards a taxonomy for visual time perception
AU - Pascal Mamassian
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/zdt4c_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zdt4c_v1/
AB - The investigation of visual time perception has uncovered a large variety of phenomena, but how these phenomena are related to each other is unclear. The ambition of the present review is to propose a principled way to class visual time phenomena into four clusters. We suggest that these four clusters result from four ultimate goals that the visual system is attempting to solve to stay well connected to our dynamic environment. These goals are to link successive events into an apparent continuous flow, to anticipate when forthcoming events will occur, to integrate sensory information to consolidate a sufficiently stable percept at each moment in time, and to hold on a perceived present so that it can be used to label events on a timeline. We then review twelve classic visual time phenomena and assign them to one of the four clusters. These twelve phenomena include four basic ones: temporal segmentation, temporal order, temporal integration, and subjective simultaneity. More complex phenomena include temporal continuity, the passage of time, perceived duration, anticipation, backward masking, postdiction, specious present, and perceived nowness. For each of the twelve phenomena, we also present the main methodologies that have been used to investigate them. Ultimately, identifying similarities and differences between visual time phenomena will advance our efforts to create a taxonomy of these phenomena.
ER -