Presentation Information
[O9-05]Representational dynamics of subjective duration in the human brain
*Camille L. Grasso1, Ladislas Nalborczyk2, Virginie van Wassenhove1 (1. CEA/DRF/Inst. Joliot, NeuroSpin; INSERM, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit; Université Paris-Saclay, Gif/Yvette, 91191 France (France), 2. Aix Marseille University, CNRS, LPL (France))
Keywords:
temporal cognition,subjective duration,neural dynamics,representational dynamics
How is time represented in the mind and brain? While durations are often thought to be mapped along a mental timeline (i.e., a unidimensional spatialized representation of durations), such a view may oversimplify the complexity of temporal representations. In this talk, I will present a project that investigates the geometry of duration representations by combining behavioral similarity judgments and representational similarity analysis of EEG data. We asked participants to rate the similarity of pairs of auditory durations and, in a separate session, recorded EEG while they performed an oddball detection task with the same stimuli. These data were used to construct representational dissimilarity matrices, which we projected into lower-dimensional spaces to visualize and compare the conceptual and neural structure of duration representations. Crucially, we explored whether the structure of neural responses could predict participants’ behavioral similarity judgments, and whether these shared structures reflected non-linear or multi-dimensional embeddings—such as helical structures—rather than simple linear mappings. We further examined how classic EEG markers of timing, such as the contingent negative variation, relate to these geometrical structures. This work contributes to a growing line of research aiming to uncover the geometry of mental representations and offers a new perspective on how durations may be encoded in the brain.