Activities

Our activities

HeaR first workshop - "Perceiving Time: New Perspectives on Temporal Experience"

Turin, May 2025, 27-28 

In philosophy, problems of temporal perception cut across many different issues. Consider listening to a piano concerto: as you hear a C major scale, you begin to anticipate the coming note. The pianist defies your expectation, resting for a surprising amount of time. The pause seems to last forever. Finally, you are relieved to hear his scale completed.

This raises the issue of how expectation, memory, and knowledge figure in the perception of events as they unfold over time. Such issues are puzzling when we consider that our perception is closely tied to what occurs at the present moment – after all, we only perceive what currently impinges on our senses. On the other hand, it is evident that the pianist’s pause has a certain temporal extension, stretching beyond the present moment. In this way, your perception seems to transcend the present, allowing you to experience a temporally extended phenomenon – and perhaps even anticipate what comes next.

Philosophical puzzles like this one are at the heart of our workshop (May 27–28 2025; Turin, Italy). We aim to explore new developments in the philosophy of temporal perception, with a particular focus on the most up-to-date issues in the field, broadly construed. We welcome contributions from all approaches empirically informed, historical or purely philosophical.

Keynote speakers

Valtteri Arstila (Turku University)

Elvira Di Bona (Turin University)

Yuval Dolev (Bar-Ilan University)

Haeran Jeong (Turku University)

Matthew Nudds (Warwick University)

Giuliano Torrengo (Milan University)

A non-exhaustive list of possible topics includes:

• The perception of change and motion

• The concept of the specious present

• Temporal experience and sense modalities  

• Multimodal and crossmodal temporal perception

• Presentness and tensed perception

• Perception of temporally extended events

• The different roles and structures of perception, memory, and anticipation

• Time in mental imagery, dreams, illusions, hallucinations, and other mental states, compared to perception

• Perceiving durations at short and long timescales

• Judgments about time based on perception

• Empirically informed perspectives on temporal perception

Presentations should be suitable for a 30-minute talk and about 20-minute Q&A. Abstracts (500 words) and a one-page short cv should be sent to danielemario.cassaghi@unito.it and donald.oxtoby@unito.it by Friday, March 21.

When: May 27–28
Where: Department of Philosophy and Human Sciences, University of Turin, Via Sant’Ottavio 20, 10124, Turin, Italy
Further information: We have some budget for travel expenses and meals
Submission deadline: Friday, March 21

Women and underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply.

This workshop is part of the activities of the FIS project HeaR “Hearing and Remembering” (FIS_00000243), led by prof. Elvira Di Bona (University of Turin).

HeaR Research Week with Jerry Viera (Sheffield) - FIS visiting research project 

March 2025, 18-21 - University of Turin, Via Sant'Ottavio 20, 10124, Turin

March, 18

Sala Incontri 1 - Main Library DFE

9.15-10.45

Daniele Cassaghi (UniTo):
The Patchy Specious Present

10.50-12.20

Mauro Lenti (UniTo):

Exploration in Child Development: A Temporal Perception Argument Against the Free-Energy Principle

14.00-16.00

Jerry Viera (University of Sheffield)
Perception and the Naïve Conception of Time (MUMBLE talk - Link)

 

March, 19

Sala Incontri 1 - Main Library DFE

9.30-11.30

Mental imagery: brain storming with the MUMBLE’s group
(with Carola Barbero, Elvira Di Bona, Alberto Voltolini, Agostino Pinna Pintor, Fabrizio Calzavarini, Davide Bordini, Matteo Plebani, Elisa Caldarola, Daniele Cassaghi, Donald Oxtoby, Mariaenrica Giannuzzi, Niccolò Nanni)

Sala Incontri 2 - Main Library DFE

13.30-15.00 

Mariaenrica Giannuzzi (UniTo):

Embodiment of Deep Time

15.05-16.35

Donald Oxtoby (UniTo): 

Does Perceptual Recognition Require Judgment?

March, 20
Sala Incontri 1 - Main Library DFE

16.00-18.00

Jerry Viera (University of Sheffield)

Constructing and Locating Events in Time (MAP talk)

March, 21

Sala Incontri 2 - Main Library DFE

9.15-10.45

Niccolò Nanni (UniTo):

Multimodal Aesthetic Perception

10.50-12.20

Elvira Di Bona (UniTo):
Carl Stumpf and Time 

12.30-14.00

Edoardo Bronzolo (UniTo):
Reflecting and Being Present: a Temporal Comparison of Introspection and Meditation 

If you wish to attend, please contact danielemario.cassaghi@unito.it or donald.oxtoby@unito.it 

Abstracts

Perception and Naive Conception of Time (by Jerry Viera, MUMBLE TALK March 18, h 14-16)

According to the naïve, or common-sense, conception of time, time has a linear structure. This linear structure can be understood in terms of a combination of three features: The world contains a single unified timeline in which events can be ordered in terms of earlier than, simultaneity, and later than relations. This timeline exhibits various causal, practical, and epistemic asymmetries. And the present moment plays a special role in this timeline as the dividing point between the past and the future.

Where does this naïve conception of time come from? According to the dependency thesis, widely endorsed in philosophy and psychology, our understanding of linear time depends on our capacities for episodic memory. As I show, many people endorse the dependency thesis because they think an understanding of linear time requires a prior awareness or experience of linear time, which they argue is only possible through episodic memory. Episodic memory provides us with a distinct awareness of time that is not possible through any other psychological faculty. Call this the distinctiveness thesis.

In this talk, I argue that the distinctiveness thesis is false. Perception itself represents time ordered, asymmetric, and distinguishes between the past, present, and future. As a result, if the dependency thesis is true at all, it must be motivated independently of the distinctiveness thesis.

Constructing and Locating Events in Time (by Jerry Viera, March 20, h 10-12)

Recent debates on the format(s) of perceptual representations have developed almost exclusively in response to insights in object and spatial perception. Within this literature varieties of representational formats are understood in syntactic / grammatical terms, with the major division being between iconic (i.e., map-like) formats and discursive (i.e., language-like) formats.

The aim of this talk is two-fold: First, to introduce a new means of understanding representational format, which I call orthographic format. Orthographic format describes a form of variation in representational format that is more fine-grained than the syntactic / grammatical formulation allows. Second, to show how combinations of syntactic and orthographic formats are employed in the construction of perceptual event representations and the process of locating these events in time.

The Patchy Specious Present (by Daniele Cassaghi, March 18, h 10-12)

The doctrine of the specious present—according to which the contents of our perceptual acts are temporally extended and thus make us aware of time intervals rather than single instants—has been the target of numerous critiques over the past decade. Some of these, such as those put forward by Arstila (2017), are based on empirical evidence.

Arstila’s starting point is the experiments conducted by Vincent Di Lollo (1980). Di Lollo presented his participants with a pair of matrices, with a 10 ms interstimulus interval in every condition. The only parameter that varied across conditions was the duration of the first matrix. Success in the task, in every condition, depended on the ability to have both matrices “available to perception.” When the first matrix lasted less than 100 ms, subjects succeeded in the task; with longer matrices, they failed. And this is the problem for theorists of the specious present: if they wish to explain successful trials in Di Lollo’s task by claiming that both matrices are present to the subject within the same specious present, they find themselves unable to explain the failures. Given the mere 10 ms interstimulus interval, both matrices are present in every condition. Thus, subjects should always succeed in Di Lollo’s task.

In this talk, I will offer an explanation of Di Lollo’s experiments that is compatible with the doctrine of the specious present. I will show that while success can be explained through subpersonal mechanisms that artificially alter the phenomenology of the visual stimulus, failure can be accounted for by the specific phenomenological configuration of the specious present: the specious present is “patchy.” In my view, the specious present is structured such that the information within it has different degrees of determinacy: maximal at what can be considered its center, and increasingly “determinable” toward the periphery. Therefore, failure in Di Lollo’s experiment is due precisely to the fact that, at the moment the second matrix appears in the center of the specious present, the presence of the first matrix in the periphery causes the relevant information required for the task to be lost.

After discussing Di Lollo’s experiments, I will first make comparisons between my view and a similar one advanced by Phillips (2011). I will then explore the role that the doctrine of the “patchy” specious present can play in the debate on the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics. In particular, Prosser (2016), Benovsky (2015), and Shardlow (2024) have, in different ways, highlighted how our phenomenology of objects is significantly different from how we expect it to be if the metaphysical doctrine of perdurantism were true. Briefly, I will attempt to show how the “patchy” specious present can explain the discrepancy between how things appear to us and how they actually are if perdurantism were true.