A percepção do tempo: contributos do procedimento de bissecção

Since the beginning of the twentieth century psychology has been interested in the experimental investigation of the temporal regulation of behavior but this area of research, known as timing, was consolidated only in the decade of 1960. Since then, several procedures used with subjects of different species have allowed the identifi cation of the most general characteristics of learned temporal regulation. One of those procedures, perhaps the most widely used, is the temporal bisection procedure. This procedure has allowed the formalization of some key properties of the temporal discrimination of stimuli and has enabled the test of distinct theoretical models of timing. In the present work we make a brief review of the temporal bisection, justify its centrality in the study of timing, describe the variations in the basic procedure, present the main results obtained with it and identify some recent applications to human participants.