Abstract
We generally experience a stable visual world in spite of regular disruptions caused by our own movements (saccades, blinks) or by the visual input itself (flashes, occlusions). In trying to understand the mechanisms responsible for this stability, saccades have been particularly well-studied, and a number of peri-saccadic perceptual distortions (spatial and temporal compression, failure to detect target displacement) have been explored. It has been shown that some of these distortions are not saccade specific, but also arise when the visual input is instead abruptly and briefly masked. Here, we demonstrate that another peri-saccadic distortion, the reversal of the temporal order of a pair of brief events, may also be found with masking. Human participants performed a temporal order judgment task, and the timing of stimuli and mask was varied over trials. Perceptual order was reversed on ~25% of the trials at the shortest stimulus to mask intervals. This was not merely a failure of target detection, since participants often reported these reversals with high subjective confidence. These findings update the constraints on models of stability around disruptions.
Highlights
Our visual system is continually challenged by disruptions, both in the form of externally imposed interruptions and internally generated saccadic eye movements
We describe and formally test a masking procedure that yields this illusory reversed order percept in the majority (9 out of 14), but not all participants, and present results characterizing the temporal dynamics of the illusion
Bearing in mind that the red target (50 ms duration) had a longer presentation time than the yellow probe (20 ms), the expected point of subjective simultaneity is at an stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 15 ms, assuming that perceptual timing for these brief stimuli is based on the midpoint of stimulus duration
Summary
Our visual system is continually challenged by disruptions, both in the form of externally imposed interruptions and internally generated saccadic eye movements. A number of studies have suggested that similar effects can be obtained during fixation if the visual scene is disrupted, by a saccade-mimicking shift of the stimuli (Mackay, 1970; O’Regan, 1984; Ostendorf et al, 2006), or even by simpler manipulations such as flicker (Terao et al, 2008) or a brief visual mask (Zimmermann et al, 2014). This has led to the suggestions that these illusory percepts are not limited to saccades, but that the spatial and temporal compression may reflect more general mechanisms responsible for visual continuity in the face of disruptions (Zimmermann et al, 2014)
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