Distortions of Subjective Time Perception Within and Across Senses (original) (raw)
Related papers
Biases of Temporal Duration Judgements in Visual and Auditory System
Psych
Background: There is evidence that temporal duration is spatially represented on a horizontal mental timeline (MTL) with relatively short durations represented on the left and long duration on the right side. Most of this evidence comes from the visual domain. Objective: With the present study, we investigated whether temporal duration judgements of visual and auditory stimuli might be affected by spatial biases in time representation. Methods: Participants were asked to estimate the temporal duration of a target with respect to a reference stimulus. Two different exposure times were used for the reference (fast and slow), and three exposure times for the target with respect to the reference (shorter, equal, longer). Two versions of the task were implemented to probe visual and auditory temporal processing. Results: Participants showed enhanced performance when the target had longer duration than the reference independently of the type of task, but they were affected in opposite way...
2011
Here, we investigate how audiovisual context affects perceived event duration with experiments in which observers reported which of two stimuli they perceived as longer. Target events were visual and/or auditory and could be accompanied by nontargets in the other modality. Our results demonstrate that the temporal information conveyed by irrelevant sounds is automatically used when the brain estimates visual durations but that irrelevant visual information does not affect perceived auditory duration (Experiment 1). We further show that auditory influences on subjective visual durations occur only when the temporal characteristics of the stimuli promote perceptual grouping . Placed in the context of scalar expectancy theory of time perception, our third and fourth experiments have the implication that audiovisual context can lead both to changes in the rate of an internal clock and to temporal ventriloquism-like effects on perceived on-and offsets. Finally, intramodal grouping of auditory stimuli diminished any crossmodal effects, suggesting a strong preference for intramodal over crossmodal perceptual grouping (Experiment 5).
Asymmetric cross-modal effects in time perception
Acta Psychologica, 2009
It is common to judge the duration of an audiovisual event, and yet it remains controversial how the judgment of duration is affected by signals from other modalities. We used an oddball paradigm to examine the effect of sound on the judgment of visual duration and that of a visual object on the judgment of an auditory duration. In a series of standards and oddballs, the participants compared the duration of the oddballs to that of the standards. Results showed asymmetric cross-modal effects, supporting the auditory dominance hypothesis: a sound extends the perceived visual duration, whereas a visual object has no effect on perceived auditory duration. The possible mechanisms (pacemaker or mode switch) proposed in the Scalar Expectancy Theory [Gibbon, J., Church, R. M., & Meck, W. H. (1984). Scalar timing in memory. In J. Gibbon & L. Allan (Eds.), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Vol. 423. Timing and time perception (pp. 52-77). New York: New York Academy of Sciences] were examined using different standard durations. We conclude that sound increases the perceived visual duration by accelerating the pulse rate in the visual pacemaker.
Effects of temporal features and order on the apparent duration of a visual stimulus
Frontiers in Psychology, 2012
The apparent duration of a visual stimulus has been shown to be influenced by its speed. For low speeds, apparent duration increases linearly with stimulus speed. This effect has been ascribed to the number of changes that occur within a visual interval. Accordingly, a higher number of changes should produce an increase in apparent duration. In order to test this prediction, we asked subjects to compare the relative duration of a 10-Hz drifting com- parison stimulus with a standard stimulus that contained a different number of changes in different conditions. The standard could be static, drifting at 10 Hz, or mixed (a combi- nation of variable duration static and drifting intervals). In this last condition the number of changes was intermediate between the static and the continuously drifting stimulus. For all standard durations, the mixed stimulus looked significantly compressed (∼20% reduction) relative to the drifting stimulus. However, no difference emerged between the static (that contained no changes) and the mixed stimuli (which contained an intermediate number of changes). We also observed that when the standard was displayed first, it appeared compressed relative to when it was displayed second with a magnitude that depended on standard duration. These results are at odds with a model of time perception that simply reflects the number of temporal features within an interval in determining the perceived passing of time.
PLOS ONE, 2015
When an object is presented visually and moves or flickers, the perception of its duration tends to be overestimated. Such an overestimation is called time dilation. Perceived time can also be distorted when a stimulus is presented aurally as an auditory flutter, but the mechanisms and their relationship to visual processing remains unclear. In the present study, we measured interval timing perception while modulating the temporal characteristics of visual and auditory stimuli, and investigated whether the interval times of visually and aurally presented objects shared a common mechanism. In these experiments, participants compared the durations of flickering or fluttering stimuli to standard stimuli, which were presented continuously. Perceived durations for auditory flutters were underestimated, while perceived durations of visual flickers were overestimated. When auditory flutters and visual flickers were presented simultaneously, these distortion effects were cancelled out. When auditory flutters were presented with a constantly presented visual stimulus, the interval timing perception of the visual stimulus was affected by the auditory flutters. These results indicate that interval timing perception is governed by independent mechanisms for visual and auditory processing, and that there are some interactions between the two processing systems.
Time on your hands: Perceived duration of sensory events is biased toward concurrent actions
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2017
Perceptual systems must rapidly generate accurate representations of the world from sensory inputs that are corrupted by internal and external noise. We can typically obtain more veridical representations by integrating information from multiple channels, but this integration can lead to biases when inputs are, in fact, not from the same source. While a considerable amount is known about how different sources of information are combined to influence what we perceive, it is not known whether temporal features are combined. It is vital to address this question given the divergent predictions made by different models of cue combination and time perception concerning the plausibility of crossmodal temporal integration, and the implications that such integration would have for research programmes in action control and social cognition. Here we present four experiments investigating the influence of movement duration on the perceived duration of an auditory tone. Participants either explicitly (Experiments 1-2) or implicitly (Experiments 3-4) produced hand movements of shorter or longer durations, while judging the duration of a concurrently presented tone (500-950 ms in duration). Across all experiments, judgments of tone duration were attracted towards the duration of executed movements (i.e., tones were perceived to be longer when executing a movement of longer duration). Our results demonstrate that temporal information associated with movement biases perceived auditory duration, placing important constraints on theories modelling cue integration for state estimation, as well as models of time perception, action control and social cognition.
Still no Evidence for Sustained Effects of Multisensory Integration of Duration
Multisensory Research, 2018
In studies on temporal order perception, immediate as well as sustained effects of multisensory integration have been demonstrated repeatedly. Regarding duration perception, the corresponding literature reports clear immediate effects of multisensory integration, but evidence on sustained effects of multisensory duration integration is scarce. In fact, a single study [Heron, J. et al. (2013). A neural hierarchy for illusions of time: Duration adaptation precedes multisensory integration, J. Vis. 13, 1–12.] investigated adaptation to multisensory conflicting intervals, and found no sustained effects of the audiovisual conflict on perceived duration of subsequently presented unimodal visual intervals. In two experiments, we provide independent evidence in support of this finding. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that adaptation to audiovisual conflict does not alter perceived duration of subsequently presented visual test intervals. Thus, replicating the results of Heron et al. (2013),...
Stimulus duration has little effect on auditory, visual and audiovisual temporal order judgement
Experimental brain research, 2018
Some classical studies on temporal order judgments (TOJ) suggested a single central process comparing stimulus onsets across modalities. The prevalent current view suggests that there is modality-specific timing estimation followed by a cross-modal stage. If the latter view is correct, TOJ's may vary depending on stimulus modality. Further, if TOJ is based only on onsets, stimulus duration should be irrelevant. To address these issues, we used both unisensory and multisensory stimuli to test whether unisensory duration processing influences cross-modal TOJ's. The stimuli were auditory noise bursts, visual squares, and their cross-modal combinations presented at 10, 40 and 500 ms durations, and various stimulus onset asynchronies. Psychometric functions were measured with an identical task in all conditions: On each trial, two stimuli were presented, one to the left, the other to the right of fixation. The participants judged which one started first. TOJ's were little aff...
Perception of Time in Articulated Visual Events
Frontiers in Psychology, 2012
Perceived duration of a sensory event often exceeds its actual duration. This phenomenon is called time dilation. The distortion may occur because sensory systems are optimized for perception within their respective modalities and not for perception of time. We investigated how the dilation of visual events depends on the duration and content of events. Observers compared the durations of two successive visual stimuli while the luminance of one of the stimuli was modulated at different temporal frequencies.Time dilation correlated with the frequency of modulation and the duration of the stimulus: the faster the modulation and the longer the stimulus duration, the larger the dilation. Notably, time dilation was also accompanied by a decreased sensitivity to stimulus duration. We show that these results are consistent with the notion that stimulus duration is estimated using measurement intervals of the lengths that depend on stimulus frequency content. Estimation of temporal frequency content is more precise using longer measurement intervals, whereas estimation of temporal location is more precise using shorter ones. As a result, visual perception will benefit from using longer intervals when the stimulus is modulated so that its frequency content is measured more precisely. A side effect of using longer temporal intervals is a larger uncertainty about the timing of stimulus offset (temporal location), ensuing time dilation and the reduction of sensitivity to duration. Our findings support the view that time dilation follows from basic principles of measurement and from the notion that visual systems are optimized for visual perception rather than for perception of time.