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Processing temporal information is crucial when interacting with the external world. Analysing the temporal properties of an event, such as its duration and the rate at which things change, allows us to learn about temporal regularities in the world around us. We use this knowledge to predict future events, guide our decisions, and plan the timing of our actions.

In addition, it also allows us to track our behavior and synchronize our interactions with our environment so that we can perform complicated behavioral tasks that require precise timing.
    
Despite the importance of temporal perception for human behaviour, our understanding of how we extract and code temporal information from sensory input is limited. The goal of the dissertation, written by Jim Maarseveen, was to study the way in which temporal information is extracted from the sensory information presented to us.

A novel theoretical model is combined with the well-known method of sensory adaptation in order to investigate several key aspects of the encoding of duration from visual information. Based on the results of the studies described in this dissertation, Maarseveen argues that duration is a high-level stimulus feature which is encoded via an effortful process which relies on attention to select relevant onset and offset information to encode duration. In addition, the presented paradigms provide insight into the different ways that sensory adaptation can be used to study temporal processing.