Action-induced changes in the perceived temporal features of visual events

Abstract

Perceived duration can be subject to deviations around the time of a voluntary action. Whether the mechanisms underlying action-induced visual duration effects are effector-specific or require a more generalized action-linked multimodal calibration with the transient visual system, however, is a question yet to be answered. Here, we investigate this using dynamic visual stimuli presented as contingent upon the execution of an arbitrarily associated voluntary manual response. Our results demonstrate that the duration of intervals with arbitrarily associated keypress–visual event pair is perceived as shorter than the duration in a pure visual condition, where the same stimuli are rather passively observed without the execution of a concurrent action. Whereas the control experiments show that motor memory and attention cannot explain the action-induced changes in perceived temporal features, action-induced changes in perceived speed are dissociated from those in perceived duration, and that the duration compression disappears using isoluminant or static stimuli, which together provide evidence that these two effects can be modulated in the motion-processing units, although via separate neural mechanisms.