Abstract
It is known that the perceived duration of visual stimuli is strongly influenced by speed: faster moving stimuli appear to last longer. To test whether this is a general property of sensory systems we asked participants to reproduce the duration of visual and tactile gratings, and visuo-tactile gratings moving at a variable speed (3.5–15 cm/s) for three different durations (400, 600, and 800 ms). For both modalities, the apparent duration of the stimulus increased strongly with stimulus speed, more so for tactile than for visual stimuli. In addition, visual stimuli were perceived to last approximately 200 ms longer than tactile stimuli. The apparent duration of visuo-tactile stimuli lay between the unimodal estimates, as the Bayesian account predicts, but the bimodal precision of the reproduction did not show the theoretical improvement. A cross-modal speed-matching task revealed that visual stimuli were perceived to move faster than tactile stimuli. To test whether the large difference in the perceived duration of visual and tactile stimuli resulted from the difference in their perceived speed, we repeated the time reproduction task with visual and tactile stimuli matched in apparent speed. This reduced, but did not completely eliminate the difference in apparent duration. These results show that for both vision and touch, perceived duration depends on speed, pointing to common strategies of time perception.
Highlights
Any sensory experience, regardless of the modality of the stimulus – visual, auditory, or tactile – is defined within a temporal interval
We used a time reproduction task to measure the apparent duration of visual, tactile, and visuo-tactile stimuli moving at various speeds
We show that motion induces temporal dilation in the tactile modality as previously shown in the visual modality: faster stimuli appear to be longer
Summary
Regardless of the modality of the stimulus – visual, auditory, or tactile – is defined within a temporal interval. Stimuli of different sensory modalities are all mapped along the same temporal dimension, allowing us to order events in time as well as to judge their relative duration. The most immediate and intuitive comprehension of time is that of a universal dimension that transcends each specific sensory modality. It has been shown that perceived time can be distorted by means of local sensory adaptation both in the visual (Johnston et al, 2006; Burr et al, 2007) and, most recently, in the tactile domain (Tomassini et al, 2010; Watanabe et al, 2010). Though likely constrained by similar computational principles, may underlie timing functions within different sensory modalities
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