Advances in modern mental chronometry

Abstract

Mental chronometry encompasses all aspects of time processing in the nervous system and constitutes a standard tool in many disciplines including theoretical and experimental psychology and human neuroscience. Mental chronometry has represented a fundamental approach to elucidate the time course of many cognitive phenomena and their underlying neural circuits over more than a century. Nowadays, mental chronometry continues evolving and expanding our knowledge, and our understanding of the temporal organization of the brain in combination with different neuroscience techniques and advanced methods in mathematical analysis. In research on mental chronometry, human reaction/responses times (RT) play a central role. Together with RTs, other topics in mental chronometry include vocal, manual and saccadic latencies, subjective time, psychological time, interval timing, time perception, internal clock, time production, time representation, time discrimination, time illusion, temporal summation, temporal integration, temporal judgment, redundant signals effect, perceptual, decision and motor time, etc. It is worth noting that there have been well over 37,000 full-length journal papers published in the last decade on a variety of topics related to simple and choice RTs, etc. This amounts to approximately 3800 papers per year, or roughly 10 papers per day (source: PubMed, similarly Thomson Reuters Web of Science). There are comprehensive reviews that deal extensively with the history of mental chronometry, experimental methods and paradigms, stochastic models, etc. as well as its relationship to other psychological and physiological variables, neuroscience methods and clinical applications.