The Timescale of Long Term Perception, the Influence of

Emotion, and the Application to Global Warming

Romke van der Meulen∗

January 23, 2011

Abstract
It has been suggested that people cannot perceive global warming because of its gradual
change over a long time. In this paper we attempt to find the timescale on which human
perception works. We show that direct sensory perception typically spans no more than
seconds. We then define long term perception as perception involving the long term episodic
memory, forming a type of perception that can span years. Such perception is a great
influence on, and itself greatly influenced by core affect. We conclude that such long term
perception could, in principle, be used to perceive such effects of global warming that can
be seen over a human lifetime, provided that these effects cause changes in local weather
patterns that are great enough to be perceived.

Keywords: long term perception, timescale, memory, episodic memory, subjective memory,
emotion, core affect, gradual change, global warming, climate change

Introduction
Global warming is a phenomenon that most people will have heard of, though few posses the
knowledge needed to properly understand it. As a result, the existence and extent of global
warming, also euphemistically referred to as climate change, are still in doubt with the general
public. In summary, the theory states that because of human emissions of greenhouse gasses
such as CO2 , reflected infra-red from the earth surface is trapped in the atmosphere, raising
global temperatures. The timescale over which such increases will occur, and the scale of changes
that might occur, are still under discussion, but it may be taken that the effects will be felt
over decades or centuries, and will instigate global changes that become increasingly dramatic.
It has been suggested (e.g. Tickell, 1990) that one of the reasons that people do not see
global warming as a threat, is because humans (and other beings) cannot directly perceive
gradual changes, even if those changes are very extensive but take place over a long time. The
story of the boiling frog is often used as an example of this: supposedly, a frog dropped in
boiling water will jump out directly, but that same frog, when placed in lukewarm water that
is slowly brought to a boil, will stay put until dead. The point to be taken from this parable
is that people cannot directly perceive slow, long term change and are therefore blind to the
effects of global warming.
To investigate whether long term changes can be detected by human beings, we propose
taking a closer look at the timescale of human perception, and its outer limits in particular: do
humans in fact have some kind of long term perception, and if so, what form does it take and
what are its limitations?
∗
Student Human Machine Communications, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

1
 Webster defines perception as stemming from the verb “to perceive”, which is defined as “to
become aware of through the senses” (Meriam-Webster, 2010). Indeed, traditional perception
research focuses heavily on the senses, and most particularly the two senses that are most acces-
sible to humans: seeing and hearing. If we take perception as less of a technical term, then it is
also a matter of research in several other disciplines, including philosophy and psychology. Here,
perception is researched more as a whole, with all human senses and our cognitive processing
coming into play. The matter of perception over extended periods of time, however, is not one
that has received much attention in these fields.
We will first review these fields, and for each try to determine what they can tell us about
the timescale of human perception. We then look at what might be needed for a type of long
term perception which, in principle, is capable of observing long term changes. We functionally
define long term perception, and its limitations. We investigate how this perception influences,
and is influenced by emotion. Finally we conclude whether long term perception as defined here
is capable of perceiving global warming, and look at the implications raised by this paper for
the global warming debate.

Consciousness
Philosophy of perception commonly focuses on the phenomenon of “consciousness”, and how
human consciousness should be placed in relation to the dimension of time. The most common
point of disagreement is whether human consciousness is temporally distributed, or takes place
in an instant, optionally using the percept or a set of percepts from the very recent past to
construct the perception of the stream of time moving from the future through the present to
the past (Dainton, 2008).
Though this discussion certainly bears on the timescale of perception, we can not use it to
find long term perception: those theories which do not posit consciousness to be instantaneous,
only assign it a timescale of a second or less (Grush proposes a duration of 300ms (Dainton,
2008)). It is on this timescale that the cognitive sciences also focus.

Cognitive systems
In the cognitive sciences, all manner of theories have been proposed for a wide spectrum of
perceptual and cognitive tasks and mechanisms. Without exception, every theory proposes a
different timescale for the phenomenon being discussed.
A line of research which has provided some very good data on the timescale of perception is
that of Event Related Potential or ERP: here, the timescale of neural responses to stimuli can
be measured with a great deal of temporal resolution, though not a very good spacial resolution.
Commonly though, the timescale of such responses is best measured in milliseconds.
An important factor in the timescale of cognitive events seems to be the level of abstraction
or integration. The higher in the cognitive architecture you go, the longer it takes to get
there. Holcombe (2006) suggests that cognitive mechanisms can be grouped temporally into
two groups: one fast for perception of low level qualities such as motion, depth and edges and
one slow using high level processes and used for perception of paring of color and motion, word
recognition and others. Here, the rate of change perceivable by the slow mechanisms is put at
around 30 Hz, or one change per 33 ms.

2
 It seems clear then that direct cognitive perception from the senses commonly does not take
more than a second or two. However, even from individual percepts of no more than a second,
we can still build percepts of a longer duration if the perception is in some way cumulative.
This seems to be the case in a neural mechanisms called the ‘internal timer’.
The internal timer has been proposed in a line of research dealing with the human ability to
estimate time duration. This research focuses on two perceptual tasks: one the task of giving
an estimate of the duration of a time interval once it is passed (retrospective) and one the
task of measuring off a time interval of a given duration (prospective). For both tasks, it is
commonly accepted that a cognitive structure in the form of an internal timer is needed. The
functional structure of such a mechanism is still under discussion. The experiments focusing
on this internal timer, however, rarely run over more than a couple of minutes, and it has been
considered unlikely that such a mechanism could be used accurately over, say, an hour (Block
and Zakay, 1997).

Memory
So we have seen that perception directly from the senses works on a timescale of at most minutes.
This can hardly be called ‘long term’. To increase the temporal range of perception then, we
need another information source that can extend this period. Fortunately, such an information
source is available to human perception: this information source is memory.
Can we define perception as including memory as a source? Ironically this is a very old
question indeed: in about 390 BCE (Jowett, 1874) Plato wrote a dialogue entitled Theaetetus
which deals with the nature of knowledge. In it a discussion between Socrates and Protago-
ras comes to the question whether knowledge is perception, and the related question whether
perception should be taken to include memory (Rowe et al., 1982).
Let us say for present purposes that long term perception by necessity includes the memory.
Which memory system should we take to be involved, since so many different systems have been
identified?
If we include short term memory in our definition of long term perception, then the time
span of such perception is certainly extended, but by how much? Researchers into short term or
working memory have asked whether the duration of short term memory is even based on time,
or whether items in short term memory will last until they are replaced. Still, in both camps
the time that an item in short term memory lasts is typically a number of seconds, minutes at
most (Barrouillet and Bernardin, 2004).
Therefore, for a truly long term perception, we need to use long term memory. Two types
of long term memory are commonly identified: declarative or fact memory and episodic or
subjective memory. The first is the type of memory used to store information, rules, facts, etc.
that are useful to us. The second is the type of memory that is most analogous with how people
commonly think of memory: when addressing episodic memory, we see again parts of our past
life near or far. This is the type of memory, and arguably the cognitive system, with the longest
temporal span: it can and often does span years.
The idea of perception involving episodic memory is not entirely new: episodic memory has
often been implicated in the “perception of self”. In theories concerning this topic, episodic
memory is used as a data source for constructing a self-image. Optionally, the relation can be
reciprocal: the current self-image can also influence the perception of episodic memory events
(Conway, 2005).

3
Long term perception
Using episodic memory, we may construct a speculative model of long term perception: such
perception involves retrieving episodic memories from a given time interval and comparing the
percepts encoded in these memories with the current percepts, resulting itself in another percept
which we will term the ‘long term percept’.
As an example, take the cliche phrase “things were much better when I was a young man”.
In this case, the speaker has retrieved a set of memories of the time when he was a young man,
and compared them with his current perceptions. Using aesthetic sense, moral sense or some
other higher level process, he has concluded that the former set of percepts have greater value.
Whether this is objectively true is another matter: in both cases, the thing being compared is
a percept or set of percepts. In any case, we have here a perceptual comparison drawn over
a period of decades, depending on the speaker’s age. This then can very aptly be called long
term perception.
Another property of this long term perception, which might be very interesting to note, is the
relation between temporal resolution and spatial resolution. When perception takes place over
seconds, the only information that may be drawn from these percepts relates to the perceiver’s
direct environment. However, in long term perception, a range of percepts is used as information,
each of which is placed different spatially as well as temporally. As such, a long term perception
such as “we had colder winters when I was a child” has a very wide temporal resolution (years)
and a correspondingly wide spatial resolution (any number of different locations the speaker
was at from which the comparison is drawn).
As a side note, in the quest to define long term perception, we might also look into such
phenomena as perception by a people as a whole, using the ’racial memory’. If such phenomena
can be reliably established, a form of long term perception might be defined whose temporal
domain spans centuries rather than decades. Alternatively, we might functionally include writ-
ten records as an alternative to memory as an information source available to perception. All
this however remains highly speculative and would involve a redefinition of perception that is
beyond the scope of this paper.
We must beware of the subjectivity of perception, which only becomes more problematic
in long term perception which relies besides the senses on memory, which is already unreliable
in its own right. Four points can be identified where the system can be affected: the initial
perception in the past, the encoding of the percepts in memory, the retrieval of the percepts,
and the current percept used for comparison. These points have each received a good amount
of individual attention in research, though in different disciplines: noise in perception is one
line of research, noise in memory encoding and retrieval is another (arguably each may be seen
as a separate line of research). Let us therefor examine one of the most salient biases that can
influence long term perception: emotion.

Emotion
Emotion has a profound impact on perception, and long term perception is no exception. Its
effects will by no means be merely detrimental. In fact, strong emotional content has long been
seen to increase memory retrieval chances (Kensinger, 2007), though not necessarily accuracy
(Sharot et al., 2004). In perception, it has been shown that people in a given mood spend
more time perceptually on content that is congruent with that mood, and are more likely to
remember it afterwards (Forgas and Bower, 1987).

4
 The four previously mentioned points are also points where long term perception may be
influenced by emotion. In this case, the system is affected by two emotional states: the state
the perceiver was in when the past percept was recorded and encoded, and the state he or she
is currently in. Given this, probably the strongest effects can be seen when past and current
emotional states are congruent: when the person is in a negative mood, she is more likely
to record percepts of negative aspects, more likely to retrieve negative memories which were
recorded at a time when she was also in a negative mood, meaning that the most salient aspects
of the memory are also likely to be negative. The same is true of positive moods. Together, we
see a very strongly self-enforcing relation between emotion and long term perception. It might
be argued though, that the long term percept is more dependant on the current mood than
past moods, since memories can be retrieved to fit with the current emotional state, which is
in fact likely according to standing theory.
Reversely, long term perception might be a strong influence on long term emotional state,
what Russell (2003) calls ‘core affect’. Normal perceptions are usually fleeting, taking place
in seconds and being of little import emotionally. Of course, there are situations where such
short term perceptions can have a profound influence on the core affect, such as learning of the
death of a family member. Such perceptions also have profound impacts on memory, and are
the subject of research into what is called “flashbulb memories”. On the whole, however, short
term perception has too little emotional impact to have significant influence on core affect. Not
so with long term perception: because these perceptions are drawn from a longer period, we
also believe them to be more important and more indicative of a significant emotional stimulus.
For example, the long term percept that “lately, everything seems to be going wrong for me” is
more influential than an individual short-term percept, and more likely to cause a shift in core
affect (in this case, toward depression).
In conclusion, we would make the broad comparison that long term perception is to mood
(core affect) as short term perception is to traditional emotion. Long term perception is influ-
ential on core affect, but is itself affected by emotion, even more so than short term perception.

Perception of Global Warming

Now that we have established long term perception, and identified some of the ways in which it
can be influenced, we move on to our main question: using long term perception, could global
warming be perceived directly? Such long term percepts as “we had colder winters when I was
a child” certainly seem to indicate this is the case.
However, what must always be remembered is that what people perceive is weather, not
climate. Therefore, any changes in climate to be perceived must also have perceivable effects
on local weather. As an example, a study from 1996 identified two common complaints about
current climate in Switzerland which had been blamed on global warming. These perceptions
turned out not to be statistically significant in the framework of climate, but rather the effect
of the high variability of weather in the Alpine climate (Rebetez, 1996).
In recent years, it might indeed seem that global warming is starting to cause weather effects
that are remarkable enough to be directly and reliably perceivable. For example, the ten hottest
years on record have occurred in the last 15 years (Stein and et al., 2006), and the number of
extreme weather events has risen (Houghton et al., 2001). These are effects that are clearly
noticeable, even for the common man. By comparing recent weather with, for example, that
of 20 or 30 years ago, it is not unreasonable to arrive at the conclusion that big changes have
taken place.

5
 Therefor, we can conclude that long term perception as conceived in this paper is sufficient
for people to directly notice the effects of global warming, if such effects create noticeable
changes in local weather within the course of a human lifetime. Also, this long term perception
is in a privileged position to influence a person’s core affect, but in turn is also heavily influenced
by current mood.
The problem is that the global warming debate has, especially recently, become an emotional
one. This means that people who have already taken a position on this issue, are likely to have
certain emotional reactions about global warming. These emotions in turn can influence long
term perception, as has been shown. Someone who doesn’t believe in global warming, has but to
retrieve memories of hot childhood summers and then compare them to one recent cold summer
to arrive at the conclusion that temperature has not changed or even dropped.
This indicates that the battle to be fought to convince people of taking action against global
warming, is one that must needs be involve emotions. When someone is convinced, long term
perception can produce congruent perceptions. When not, long term perception can produce
counter evidence. Since long term perception and core affect form a reinforcing system, there
is a tipping point: when one is swayed toward the acceptance of global warming as a risk, the
other is sure to follow.

Discussion
Long term perception as shown here is a functional grouping of memory and perception.
Whether long term perception might be called an actual extant property of the cognitive sys-
tem is another matter. However, even if it is not, still long term perception could receive some
attention. Since such statements as “we had colder winters when I was a child” are often made,
it is profitable to study the causes for such a conclusion, even if such research might only involve
a meta analysis using results from research into the senses and episodic memory.
There are several remaining questions on long term perception that might be answered by
more research. What are the precise temporal and spatial limitations of such perception? What
kinds of contrast thresholds limit such a system of perception? Can long term perception be
examined by researching the senses and episodic memory separately, or is the whole system
more than the sum of its parts?
For such research to be conducted, the phenomenon of long term perception should first be
properly defined. For this, this paper merely gives some pointers and considerations to build on.
But if properly defined, long term perception could spark a new and exciting field of research
in itself.

6
References
Barrouillet, P. and Bernardin, S. (2004). Time constraints and resource sharing in adults
working memory spans. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 53(1):83–100.

Block, R. and Zakay, D. (1997). Prospective and retrospective duration judgments. Psychonomic
Bulletin & Review, 4(2):184–197.

Conway, M. (2005). Memory and the self. Journal of Memory and Language, 53(4):594–628.

Dainton, B. (2008). The experience of time and change. Philosophy Compass, 3(4):619–638.

Forgas, J. and Bower, G. (1987). Mood effects on person-perception judgments. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1):53–60.

Holcombe, A. O. (2006). Seeing slow and seeing fast: two limits on perception. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 13(5):216–221.

Houghton, J., Din, Y., and et al. (2001). Climate change 2001: Working group i: The scientific
basis. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Section 2.7.4, Retrieved on january 3rd,
2011 from http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=
/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/088.htm.

Jowett, B. (1874). The Dialogues of Plato. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved december 20th, 2010
from http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1726.

Kensinger, E. (2007). Negative emotion enhances memory accuracy. Current Directions In

Psychological Science, 16(4):213–218.

Meriam-Webster (2010). to perceive. http://www.merriam-webster.com.

Rebetez, M. (1996). Public expectations as an element of human perception of climate change.

Climatic Change, 32(4):495–509.

Rowe, C., Welbourne, M., and Williams, C. (1982). Knowledge, perception and memory:
Theaetetus 166 b. The Classical Quarterly, 32(2):304. Retrieved december 20th, 2010 from
http://www.jstor.org/pss/638569.

Russell, J. A. (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological
Review, 110(1):145172.

Sharot, T., Delgado, M. R., and Phelps, E. A. (2004). How emotion enhances the feeling of
remembering. Nature neuroscience, 7(12):1376 –1380.

Stein, K. and et al. (2006). State of the climate in 2005 - executive summary. Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society, 87(6).

Tickell, C. (1990). Human effects of climate change: Excerpts from a lecture given to the society
on 26 march 1990. The Geographical Journal, 156(3):325–329.