Temporal Perceptual Learning

Our interaction with the environment and each other is inherently time-varying in nature. It is thus not surprising that the nervous systems of animals have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to not only tell time, but to learn to discriminate and produce temporal patterns. Indeed some of the most sophisticated human behaviors, such as speech and music, would not exist if the human brain was unable to learn to discriminate and produce temporal patterns. Compared to the study of other forms of learning, such as visual perceptual learning, the study of the learning of interval and temporal pattern discrimination in the subsecond range is relatively recent. A growing number of studies over the past 15 years, however, have established that perceptual and motor timing undergo robust learning. One of the principles to have emerged from these studies is that temporal learning is generally specific to the trained interval, an observation that has important implications to the neural mechanisms underlying our ability to tell time.