Abstract
Adaptation to fast motion reduces the perceived duration of stimuli displayed at the same location as the adapting stimuli. Here we show that the adaptation-induced compression of time is specific for translational motion. Adaptation to complex motion, either circular or radial, did not affect perceived duration of subsequently viewed stimuli. Adaptation with multiple patches of translating motion caused compression of duration only when the motion of all patches was in the same direction. These results show that adaptation-induced compression of event-time occurs only for uni-directional translational motion, ruling out the possibility that the neural mechanisms of the adaptation occur at early levels of visual processing.
Highlights
There have been major advances over the last few decades in our understanding of how the human brain processes spatial information, time perception remains very much a mystery
To better understand the mechanisms underlying the interactions between visual motion and event time, we investigated in this study whether complex motions, such as expansion or rotation affect perceived duration
The point of subjective equality (PSE) is given by the median of the psychometric functions. For both translational and circular motion, in the baseline condition the PSE was near the physical speed of the reference grating (10 Hz), but shifted to around 13–17 Hz after adaptation
Summary
There have been major advances over the last few decades in our understanding of how the human brain processes spatial information, time perception remains very much a mystery. Adaptation-induced aftereffects on perceived time do not generalize to the entire visual field but are spatially selective to the region that has been adapted[10,12]: Burr et al.[11] went on to show that the spatial-selectivity is spatiotopic not retinotopic, suggesting that the reference frame of the adaptation-induced distortions of event time is in real-world, rather than retinal coordinates (but see refs 13–15) It is still far from clear why adaptation to fast-moving stimuli should affect event-time, especially as it does so directly, not via perceived speed or other intermediate mechanisms. To better understand the mechanisms underlying the interactions between visual motion and event time, we investigated in this study whether complex motions, such as expansion or rotation affect perceived duration. We investigated whether adaptation to motion that entails multiple motion directions (characterizing rotational and radial motion but not linear translation) is a key factor in causing time distortions
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