Department of Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India; Centre for Developing Intelligent Systems, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. Electronic address: ishansinghal@hotmail.com.
2 papers in the library · 7 citations · publishing 2025
Mental imagery unfolds at distinct timescales, with imagined contents being sluggish but more stable than visual perception. A large cohort (N = 827) completed six tasks recreating aspects of their imagination, revealing that temporal features of imagination can be accounted for by two factors: temporal ability and stability of mental imagery. Both imagination and perception share a common constraint: maintaining identically sized temporal windows of conscious experience.
Awareness of visual stimuli unfolds across multiple timescales, not just one. Using continuous flash suppression (CFS) with flicker rates of 1, 4, 10, and 25 Hz, four experiments with 48 participants showed that different flicker frequencies maximally disrupted distinct aspects of awareness: entry into awareness, attentional sampling, perceptual grouping, and exit from awareness each had a unique vulnerable flicker rate. These results suggest that temporal hierarchies in perception correspond to multiple timescales of conscious processing, challenging single-timescale theories of consciousness.