Within the traditional notion of the senses, the perception of time is especially puzzling. There is no specific physical energy carrying information about time, and hence no sensory receptors can transduce a ‘temporal stimulus.’ Time-related properties of events can instead be shown to emerge from specific perceptual processes involving multisensory interactions. In this chapter, we will examine five such properties: the awareness that two events occur at the same time (simultaneity) or one after the other (succession); the coherent time-stamping of events despite inaccuracies and imprecisions in coding simultaneity and succession (temporal coherence); the awareness of the temporal extent occupied by events (duration); the organization of events in regular temporal units (rhythm).
