Origines et développement des théories d’horloge interne du temps psychologique

The article describes the origins and development of internal clock theory. The history is traced via body temperature studies in the 1920s and 1930s, with input from 19th. century and early 20th. century psychophysics, through to the model of Treisman (1963). This model derived timed behaviour from an interaction of internal clock, memory store, and comparison processes. A successor to Treisman's model was the scalar expectancy theory (SET) of Gibbon and colleagues (1984). The origins of SET in animal Psychology are described, as is its application to human timing (in the early 1990s), in particular recent work on the operation of the internal clock itself. Finally, a discussion of some recent developmental studies of timing illustrates both how internal clock models have been applied, and how modern research may require a reconceptualization of the operation of classical internal clock models.