10/05/2023 
Sion | HES-SO Valais-Wallis | VS-ENP.21.N307
12:00 - 13:00
While perceptual information arrives more or less continuously over time, our mind apprehends coherent and delimited sub-sequences that have beginnings, middles, and ends and extend over time. For example, speech unfolds continuously without pauses between words, but we understand meaningful units at multiple hierarchical levels, such as phonemes, syllables, words, and phrases, and “hallucinated” pauses at the rhythm of these perceived mental units. A central problem has been to understand how and why the continuous stream of experiences is thus partitioned. In this conference, Prof. Lucia Melloni (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and NYU Grossman School of Medicine) will present studies in which she used invasive and non-invasive electrophysiology and computer modeling in tasks involving artificial sequences and visual narratives. These studies revealed the calculations and the brain mechanism mediating the segmentation and encoding of sequences with the broader goal of understanding the constitutive elements of temporal experience and why time flows as it does, for example, how we can apprehend, feel, and marvel at the temporal structure of music.