Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 60, April 2018, Pages 98-126
Consciousness and Cognition

Is conscious perception a series of discrete temporal frames?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.02.012Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper reviews proposals that conscious perception consists, in whole or part, of successive discrete temporal frames on the sub-second time scale, each frame containing information registered as simultaneous or static. Although the idea of discrete frames in conscious perception cannot be regarded as falsified, there are many problems. Evidence does not consistently support any proposed duration or range of durations for frames. EEG waveforms provide evidence of periodicity in brain activity, but not necessarily in conscious perception. Temporal properties of perceptual processes are flexible in response to competing processing demands, which is hard to reconcile with the relative inflexibility of regular frames. There are also problems concerning the definition of frames, the need for informational connections between frames, the means by which boundaries between frames are established, and the apparent requirement for a storage buffer for information awaiting entry to the next frame.

Introduction

Subjectively, conscious perception is smooth and continuous. Things move on from one moment to the next, and we perceive motion and all other forms of change (while they are going on) without any hint of discontinuity. Conscious percepts must have some level of temporal granularity, and that may be set by fundamental operating characteristics of neurons. That level of granularity could be far below the temporal resolution of perception, much as the level of granularity in a digital photograph, the pixel, is usually far below the resolution of the photograph that is detectable to the eye. The finest temporal resolution in perception is found in specialised processors such as echolocation mechanisms in bats and electric field fluctuation detectors in electric fish, which can detect temporal phenomena on the nanosecond time scale (Carr, 1993, Simmons, 1973, Simmons, 1979). In humans, differences in arrival times of sound to the two ears can be resolved on a scale of microseconds (Grothe, 2003). There is no percept of temporal succession at that level, however. Instead, the percept is of spatial localisation of a single sound source, and this does not resolve into a percept of two successive sounds until the time difference is ∼5 ms (Wallach, Newman, and Rosenzweig, 1949). This is an indication that the fundamental temporal resolution in conscious perception may be on the millisecond time scale but perhaps <10 ms.

Some authors, however, have proposed a level of temporal resolution in conscious percepts that is much coarser than that. In general terms, the proposal is that perceptual experience is packaged into discrete temporal frames on the sub-second scale, and that the apparent flow and continuity of perceptual experience over time is a superficial phenomenon that is underlain by temporal discontinuity on a time scale of a substantial fraction of a second. The aim of the present paper is to review and assess such proposals. Table 1 sets out the structure of the review.

Most proposals have had little to say about how a frame should be defined, but it is possible to point to some general features that will suffice for the time being. A common feature of the definition of frames is that they mark a boundary between events that are perceived as simultaneous versus nonsimultaneous (e.g. Crick and Koch, 2003, Pöppel, 1997, Pöppel, 2009, VanRullen and Koch, 2003). Thus, all information within a given frame has experienced contemporaneity, and events can only be perceived as occurring at different times if they occur in different frames. This implies a certain level of co-ordination in perceptual processing: given that different processes are separate, both functionally and neuroanatomically, especially if they occur in different modalities, there must be some kind of process that effectively assigns their products to bins in a co-ordinated way, as the foundation for experienced contemporaneity. It is sometimes stated in addition that the partitioning of percepts into temporal frames is endogenous and not affected by times of occurrence of external events (Harter, 1967, Stroud, 1956, Ulrich, 1987). However, Haber and Hershenson (1973) proposed that a series of frames could be initiated by the onset of a stimulus and ended at the frame containing the termination of the stimulus. It is also sometimes argued that a frame represents an updating interval: in effect, frames represent the maintenance of information in a static representation, and a new frame starts when some process of frame construction or updating is completed (Kozma and Freeman, 2017, VanRullen et al., 2014).

The extreme form of the frame hypothesis is that there is just a single frame (at a time) that encompasses all of perception. This extreme form is hardly every encountered in the literature. It seems to be implied in Stroud's (1956) proposal of a psychological moment, and is explicit in Pöppel, 1997, Pöppel, 2009, where research evidence from multiple areas, supposedly converging on a common duration for a frame of conscious perception, is taken as evidence for the generality of the proposed frame. Most other authors have endorsed frames that are local, sometimes to modalities (usually vision), sometimes to defined activities, processes, or mechanisms within modalities, such as visual attention, and sometimes of variable duration.

An analogy is sometimes taken with film projection, originally by Ansbacher, 1944, Stroud, 1956, and by others since, including Craig, 2009a, Freeman, 2006, Hogendoorn, 2016, Kozma and Freeman, 2017, McComas and Cupido, 1999, and Pockett, Brennan, Bold, and Holmes (2011). In this analogy, the frame of conscious perception is equivalent to a single frame of a film in the gate of the projector, and the subjective fluency of conscious perception is equivalent to the continuity of the film as projected on the screen. The analogy is imperfect because, in fact, the projection on the screen is also a series of stills, and the illusion of temporal continuity is a product of the operating characteristics of visual information processing, such as the flicker fusion frequency (Carmel et al., 2007, Curran and Wattis, 1998).1 However, the analogy does serve to elucidate a significant problem for the frame hypothesis: if everything within a single frame is experienced as contemporaneous, and then it is replaced by a new frame, within which again everything is experienced as contemporaneous, why does the succession of static frames not give rise to subjective jerkiness in conscious perception, and how is the subjective continuity of conscious perception established?

An analogy can be taken with the patient suffering from akinetopsia studied by Zihl, von Cramon, and Mai (1983). Based on her self-report, her visual world consisted of a series of static images lacking any motion information, which left her able to make judgments about temporal succession but unable to judge simple practical matters such as when to stop pouring tea into a cup. The time scale of image succession is not clear but could have been around 1 s or more; clinical testing suggested that this depended on factors such as speed of stimulus motion. However, the point is that the discrete frame hypothesis implies that conscious perception should proceed in a series of static images with jerks marking the transition from one frame to the next, resulting in a faster version of akinetopsia. In fact, our perceptual experience does not resemble that of the patient with akinetopsia, even allowing for the slower frame-rate she may have experienced.

There are at least two possible solutions to that problem. One is that limited temporal resolution in specific areas of information processing may result in a kind of smearing of information across multiple frames, which effectively obscures frame boundaries. Taking up the analogy with film projection, when watching a film, continuous motion and change are perceived because the rate of frame presentation is faster than the flicker fusion rate (Carmel et al., 2007, Curran and Wattis, 1998). Perceptible flicker or jerkiness only occurs if the frame-rate of the film projection is reduced to a value below the flicker fusion rate. Thus, so long as frame duration is shorter than the temporal resolution of relevant processes, the progression of frames should not be experienced as jerky. The second solution is that the continuity of experience may be created by some kind of filling-in process, such as model-fitting, which would impose a model of continuity on discrete packets of information (VanRullen et al., 2014). VanRullen et al. (2014) argued that this could be a temporal analogue of the visual mechanisms that fill in the blind spot in the visual field (Durgin et al., 1995, Fiorani et al., 2003).

Section snippets

Early proposals

The idea that conscious percepts fall into discrete temporal frames has a long history: something like it appeared over 2000 years ago in Buddhist thinking (Herzog et al., 2016, Pockett et al., 2011). In more recent scientific work it may date back to von Baer (1862),2 although the original presentation does not survive and there is uncertainty about its content (Elliott & Giersch, 2016).

Recent proposals about discrete frames

Specific proposals will be briefly summarised and evaluated against either the kinds of evidence on which the authors of the proposals called or on evidence relevant to the proposed frame durations. Issues that apply to all the proposals will be addressed in Section 4.

Evidence

It is evident that the hypothesized duration of a discrete frame varies greatly between proposals, as shown in Table 2. This alone should suffice to raise a warning flag. What makes one proposal better than the others? In fact, as this review has shown, none of the proposals is strongly supported by evidence. The authors of the proposals have called upon evidence that is consistent with the frame duration they have proposed, but have paid little or no attention to the evidence that supports the

Conclusion

The hypothesis of discrete frames in conscious perception has not been falsified. It is very unlikely, in the current state of evidence, that there could be discrete frames encompassing the whole of conscious perception, or that there could be discrete frames encompassing an entire modality. Hypotheses concerning frames on a more local scale, such as specific kinds of perceptual processes, would be harder to falsify. However, the prospects are not encouraging. There is some disconfirmatory

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