Perceptual-moment theories

Abstract

The theory that the temporal flow of events is perceived as a succession of discrete moments has long fascinated psychologists and neuroscientists. Perceptual-moment theories generally hold that events appear successive and in temporal order only if their sensory messages arrive in different moments; otherwise, events appear simultaneous and in no temporal order. Three varieties of perceptual-moment theory assume that moments are disjunct and autonomous (autonomous-moments theory), that the arrival of a sensory message triggers a stream of disjunct moments (triggered-moments theory), or that an autonomous moment moves continuously (moving-moment theory). Previous psychophysical analyses of the moment concept did not respect the neural noise inherent to the brain by prohibiting any fluctuation in the moment duration or even in the transmission times. We present generalized models rooted in the three varieties of perceptual-moment theory, which allow the separation of latency noise and moment-duration noise under various plausible distributional assumptions. Our simulations demonstrate that only the autonomous-moments model does not produce central plateaus, which are often observed in simultaneity judgments and sometimes in temporal-order judgments. When fitting 18 perceptual-moment models to three simultaneity-judgment data sets and three temporal-order judgment data sets, the autonomous-moments model provides a worse fit compared to the triggered-moments and moving-moment models, consistently across both tasks and all plausible distributional assumptions. In conclusion, the rigorous psychophysical analysis suggests that even under relaxed assumptions, the classic autonomous-moments theory is unable to explain even the simplest temporal judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).