Editorial Temporal processing within and across senses Argiro Vatakis a, ⁎, Rolf Ulrich b a Cognitive Systems Research Institute (CSRI), Athens, Greece b University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany abstract article info Available online 5 February 2014 PsycINFO: 2300 Human Experimental Psychology 2320 Sensory Perception Keywords: Time estimation Vierordt’s Law Synchrony perception Multisensory Auditory Visual This special issue on temporal processing within and across senses was the outcome of a two-day workshop that took place in Tübingen, Germany. The aim of the workshop and this special issue was to advance our knowledge on timing and the senses and to bring together two lines of research that have not yet interacted, those of syn- chrony and duration perception. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. We act and interact in a multisensory world and seldom our experi- ences are confined to a single modality. The multiple sensory streams composing a given event carry information that might be redundant and/or complementary but ultimately they are integrated into a unified, multisensory experience (Vatakis, 2013). This multisensory experience has received a longstanding interest from basic researchers but the last ten years or so, this interest has been augmented given the need to better understand sensory processing and interaction. Currently, timing research has been focusing on the perception of synchrony, duration, and sensorimotor coordination using unimodal stimulation and more recently multimodal events (from simple pairings of beeps and flashes to audiovisual dynamic action or speech video clips). This move towards multisensory settings although exciting is often associated with contradictory data interpretations that are as yet unresolved. How do we perceive synchronous multisensory events given that the transduction and processing time differ between the sen- sory streams? Is integration possible when timing is impaired? How do we perceive a given interval to be of different duration when all remain constant apart from the modality of presentation? Are sensory signals controlled by a centralized, amodal clock or multiple, distributed clocks? In an attempt to discuss the above-mentioned questions and to bring together, for the first time, researchers working on the perception of syn- chrony and duration, we organized an intense two-day workshop on the “Temporal Processing Within and Across Senses”. The workshop took place in Tübingen, the place of vigorous activity on the establishment of various methodological approaches in studying time perception by Karl von Vierordt (Vierordt, 1868; see Lejeune & Wearden, 2009, for a review of his work). The 19 speakers and 23 junior participants were sponsored by the European COST Action TD0904 on Time In MEntaL activity: theo- retical, behavioral, bioimaging, and clinical perspectives (TIMELY). A natural follow-up to the Tübingen meeting was this special issue that you are currently reading. The response to this issue was over- whelming, making the page limitations a great burden for the editors. In the end, we managed to put together a two-part special issue on the topic covering new research findings in all aspects of timing within and across the senses. Much more work is still needed but the large re- sponse to this issue shows the intensity of research for answering the above-mentioned questions and most probably posing new ones to ponder on! We would like to thank all of the authors, reviewers, and Journal staff for their help and patience throughout this process. Acknowledgments The authors were supported by the European COST Action ISCH TD0904 “TIMELY” (www.timely-cost.eu). The funding source had no in- volvement in the preparation of this article. We would like to thank all the speakers and researchers that participated in the TIMELY Workshop on “Temporal Processing Within and Across Senses” that took place in 4–5 October, 2012 in Tübingen, Germany. References Lejeune, H., & Wearden, J. H. (2009). Vierordt's The Experimental Study of the Time Sense (1868) and its legacy. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 21, 941–960. Vatakis, A. (2013). The role of stimulus properties and cognitive processes in the quality of the multisensory perception of synchrony. In L. Albertazzi (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of experimental phenomenology. Visual perception of shape, space and appearance. (pp. 243–263). : Wiley-Blackwell. Vierordt, K. (1868). Der Zeitsinn nach Versuchen. Tübingen, Germany: Verlag der H. Laupp'schen Buchhandlung. Acta Psychologica 147 (2014) 1 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Makedonomachou Prantouna 7, 11525 Athens, Greece. Tel.: + 30 2110124543. E-mail address: argiro.vatakis@gmail.com (A. Vatakis). 0001-6918/$ – see front matter © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.01.001 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Acta Psychologica journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/ locate/actpsy