Abstract
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 comparison 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 combination 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.
Highlights
The explicit encoding of the duration of events within the subsecond range is crucial for a number of everyday tasks from timing action such as deciding when to step onto an escalator or when to move off at traffic lights to picking up social signals encoded in the duration of mutual gaze
We investigated the effect of the number of temporal changes and order on the apparent duration of visual intervals that were at most a few seconds long
The dilation effect induced by speed or temporal frequency on the perceived duration of a visual stimulus has been traditionally seen as a supporting evidence for a change-based theory of time perception (Fraisse, 1963; Poynter, 1989)
Summary
The explicit encoding of the duration of events within the subsecond range is crucial for a number of everyday tasks from timing action such as deciding when to step onto an escalator or when to move off at traffic lights to picking up social signals encoded in the duration of mutual gaze. A substantial number of studies have shown that the apparent duration of a visual stimulus in the order of milliseconds can be distorted by generic factors, such as stimulus novelty (Pariyadath and Eagleman, 2007, 2008) or attention (Tse et al, 2004; Cicchini and Morrone, 2009), and by visually specific manipulations, such as adaptation to visual motion (Johnston et al, 2006, 2008; Burr et al, 2007; Ayhan et al, 2009, 2011; Bruno et al, 2010), contrast (Bruno and Johnston, 2010), and reduced illumination (Bruno et al, 2011) These observations have led some authors to question the ability of the classic pacemaker–accumulator model (Creelman, 1962; Treisman, 1963; Treisman et al, 1990) to fully account for the perceptual encoding of temporal intervals. Studies revealed that moving stimuli tend to be seen as having a longer duration than stationary ones (Brown, 1931; Roelofs and Zeeman, 1951; Goldstone and Lhamon, 1974; Lhamon and Goldstone, 1974)
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