Forscher geben Aufschluss darüber, was passiert, wenn wir die Dauer eines visuellen Reizes abschätzen. Ausgehend von dem, was wir sehen, werden zeitliche Informationen in zunehmend komplexeren Phasen verarbeitet: vom okzipitalen visuellen Kortex über die parietalen und prämotorischen Bereiche bis hin zu den Frontalregionen

>Using high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and measuring time perception in healthy volunteers, the researchers shed light on what happens in the brain when we estimate the duration of a visual stimulus.“Our results show that time perception is not a unitary process, but the outcome of multiple processing stages distributed across the cerebral cortex,” the authors explain. “Each stage contributes differently, from encoding physical duration to constructing the subjective experience of time.”
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>In an initial stage, occipital visual areas encode duration through gradual (monotonic) neural responses: the longer the stimulus, the stronger the neural response. This information is then transformed in parietal and premotor regions into selective (unimodal) representations, where distinct neural populations respond preferentially to specific durations, enabling the “readout” of time. Finally, higher-order regions—including the frontal cortex and anterior insula—are involved in the subjective categorization of duration, shaping how time is perceived.

[Neuronal populations across the cortex underlie discrete, categorical, and subjective representations of visual durations | PLOS Biology](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003704)