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Accumulated evidence has shown that the subjective time in the sub-second range can be altered by different factors; some are related to stimulus features such as luminance contrast and spatial frequency, others are processes like perceptual grouping and contextual modulation. These findings indicate that temporal perception uses neural signals involved in non-temporal feature processes and that perceptual organization plays an important role in shaping the experience of elapsed time. We suggest that the temporal representation of objects can be treated as a feature of objects. This new concept implies that psychological time can serve as a tool to study the principles of neural codes in the perception of objects like reaction time. Whereas reaction time usually reflects the state of transient signals crossing decision thresholds, apparent time in addition reveals the dynamics of sustained signals, thus providing complementary information of what has been obtained from reaction time studies.

The experienced speed of the passage of time is not constant as time can seem to fly or slow down depending on the circumstances we are in. Anecdotally accidents and other frightening events are extreme examples of the latter; people who have survived from accidents often report altered phenomenology including how everything appeared to happen in slow motion. While the experienced phenomenology has been investigated, there are no explanations about how one can have these experiences. Instead, the only recently discussed explanation suggests that the anecdotal phenomenology is due to memory effects and hence not really experienced during the accidents. The purpose of this article is i) to reintroduce the currently-forgotten comprehensively altered phenomenology that some people experience during the accidents, ii) to explain why the recent experiments fail to touch the issue at hand, and iii) to suggest a new framework to explain what happens when people experience time slowing down in these cases. The presented solution is realistic in a sense that it maintains that sometimes people really do have such experiences.