Representation of Space and Time in Visual Cognition

Time and space seem intuitively to be among the most essential and foundational aspects of our perceptual experience. For example, events are always experienced as occupying certain moments in time, and objects are always perceived as being located at certain positions in space. Time and space thus seem like underlying continuous mediums for the rest of perception. In contrast to the seemingly continuous nature of time and space, a great deal of recent research in visual cognition has explored discrete representations---in particular, how space and time are segmented into discrete objects and events, and how such discrete units then influence processes such as attention, memory, and action. This dissertation explores the counterintuitive possibility that discrete representations of objects and events are themselves so foundational to perceptual processing that they can influence, and even distort, underlying representations of time and space. The experiments presented in this dissertation serve as a series of case studies in support of this possibility, showing that: (I) event segmentation influences perceived durations, such that highly segmented spans of time are perceived as compressed relative to unsegmented spans; (2) selective visual attention increases the temporal resolution of visual awareness, leading to more accurate representations of the relative timing of spatially distant events; (3) selective visual attention distorts visual space, such that selected objects are misperceived as closer together, while unselected objects are simultaneously misperceived as further apart; and (4) processes of object persistence---involved in binding individual views together into representations of persisting individuals---enhance spatial representations in long-term memory, as demonstrated via a virtual navigation task. These studies collectively suggest that discrete representations of objects and events are important primitives in visual processing, able to influence and distort even seemingly more basic representations of time and space themselves.