Main description:

Our ability to attend selectively to our surroundings - taking notice of the things that matter, and ignoring those that don't - is crucial if we are to negotiate the world around us in an efficient manner. Several aspects of the temporal dimension turn out to be critical in determining how we can put together and select the events that are important to us as they themselves unfold over time. For example, we often miss events that happen while we are occupied
perceiving or responding to another stimulus. On the other hand, temporal regularity between events can also greatly improve our perception.

In addition, our perception of the passage of time itself can also be distorted as while we are performing actions or paying attention to different aspects of the environment. Surprisingly, this fascinating and fundamental interplay between ' attention' and 'time' has been relatively neglected in the psychology and neuroscience literatures until very recently.

Attention & Time is the first book to address this foundational topic, bringing together several intriguing and hitherto fragmented findings into a compelling and cohesive field of enquiry. The book contains thirty-one critical-review chapters from internationally recognised experts in the field, carefully organised into three stand-alone, yet extensively cross-referenced, themed sections. Each section focuses on distinct ways in which attention and time influence one another. These
sections, each encompassing a range of methodologies from classical cognitive psychology to single-cell neurophysiology, provide functionally unifying frameworks to help guide the reader through the many various experimental and theoretical approaches adopted.

Section 1 considers variations of attention across time, and explores how attentional allocation is limited by very short or very long intervals of time. Section 2 describes several types of temporal illusion, illustrating how attention can modulate the perception of the passage of time itself. "A watched pot never boils" and, conversely, "time flies when you're having fun" nicely capture the experimental observation that the degree of attention allocated to stimulus timing contributes to its
subjective duration. Finally, Section 3 examines how attention can be directed in time, to predictable or expected moments in time, so as to optimise behaviour.

Bringing conceptually discrete, yet functionally related, fields of temporal attention research together within a single volume, this book provides a comprehensive overview that will be of value to the interested novice in cognitive neuroscience, whilst also inspiring experts in the field to make, perhaps previously overlooked, links with their own field of research.

Contents:

SECTION 1: ATTENTION IS LIMITED IN TIME ; 1. Attending to emerging representations: the importance of task context and time of response ; 2. Inhibition of return ; 3. The Attentional blink: temporal constraints on consciousness ; 4. The attentional boost and the attentional blink ; 5. A stream of thought: temporal organization of mental operations ; 6. Vigilant attention ; 7. Prior entry: attention and temporal perception ; SECTION 2: TIME PERCEPTION IS MODULATED BY ATTENTION, PERCEPTION AND ACTION ; 8. Timing, resources, and interference: attentional modulation of time perception ; 9. Mental timing and the central attentional bottleneck ; 10. Attention underlies subjective temporal expansion ; 11. Duration illusions and predictability ; 12. Temporal dilation: the chronostasis illusion and spatial attention ; 13. Space-time in the brain ; 14. Modulation of time perception by visual adaptation ; 15. Temporal binding ; SECTION 3: DIRECTING ATTENTION IN TIME ENHANCES PERCEPTION AND ACTION ; SECTION 3A: TEMPORAL PREDICTIONS INHERENT IN THE TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF EVENTS ; 16. Behavioural adaptation to redundant frequency distributions in time ; 17. On the locus of temporal preparation: enhancement of pre-motor processes? ; 18. Excitatory and inhibitory motor mechanisms of temporal preparation ; 19. Timing structures neuronal activity during preparation for action ; 20. The neural basis of temporal prediction and the role of dopamine ; 21. Foreperiod and Sequential Effects: theory and data ; 22. Neuroanatomical substrates of foreperiod effects ; 23. Attending to sound patterns and the role of entrainment ; 24. Electrophysiological markers of foreperiod effects ; 25. Neural bases of rhythm prediction ; SECTION 3B: TEMPORAL PREDICTIONS GUIDED BY ENDOGENOUS CUES ; 26. Enhancing behavioural performance by visual temporal orienting ; 27. How can temporal expectations bias perception and action? ; 28. Temporal orienting in audition, touch, and across modalities ; 29. Neurophysiology of temporal orienting in ventral visual stream ; 30. Temporal prediction during duration perception ; 31. Neural substrates of temporal attentional orienting