Does your cat know when it’s time to be fed? Does your dog know what time you arrive home from work? The world animals experientially inhabit is far removed from our human world – and this extends to their perception of time. This doesn’t mean time is just subjective however, in fact the differences between our human perception of time and animal time suggests an objective time by which we measure these differences against, writes Samuel Baron.
Imagine you’re standing on a beach at night. In the distance, you see a slowly pulsing light. Now imagine the pulsing starts to get faster. It quickly gains speed until, after a while, you no-longer see a pulse. Instead, you see a single light, holding steady.
This is an example of temporal resolution. Our perceptual systems are only able to discern something as changing, when the change is sufficiently slow. Speed the change up, and we no-longer discern any change at all. Instead, we experience an illusion of constancy. In fact, we experience this illusion all the time. Computer and television screens flicker at a certain rate. But the flicker happens so fast, we don’t see it.
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