Perceptual Content, Not Physiological Signals, Determines Perceived Duration When Viewing Dynamic, Natural Scenes

Marta Suárez-Pinilla,Zafeirios Fountas,Anil K Seth,Kyriacos Nikiforou,Warrick Roseboom

doi:10.1525/collabra.234

Abstract

The neural basis of time perception remains unknown. A prominent account is the pacemaker-accumulator model, wherein regular ticks of some physiological or neural pacemaker are read out as time. Putative candidates for the pacemaker have been suggested in physiological processes (heartbeat), or dopaminergic mid-brain neurons, whose activity has been associated with spontaneous blinking. However, such proposals have difficulty accounting for observations that time perception varies systematically with perceptual content. We examined physiological influences on human duration estimates for naturalistic videos between 1–64 seconds using cardiac and eye recordings. Duration estimates were biased by the amount of change in scene content. Contrary to previous claims, heart rate, and blinking were not related to duration estimates. Our results support a recent proposal that tracking change in perceptual classification networks provides a basis for human time perception, and suggest that previous assertions of the importance of physiological factors should be tempered.

Highlights

Duration perception in the range of seconds to minutes is an essential feature of cognition and behaviour; its precise underlying neural mechanisms are still unclear
The prominent pacemakeraccumulator model proposes that duration perception arises from a process wherein a pacemaker generates sequential neural pulses that are stored in an accumulator: according to this suggestion, the number of pulses accumulated over a certain interval constitutes the brain’s estimation of the duration of that interval (Church, 1984; Treisman et al, 1990)
London, UK Corresponding author: Marta Suárez-Pinilla (m.pinilla@ucl.ac.uk) oscillators, each with phasic activity operating on different timescales (Matell & Meck, 2004; Mauk & Buonomano, 2004; Treisman et al, 1990; van Rijn, Gu, & Meck, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

Duration perception in the range of seconds to minutes is an essential feature of cognition and behaviour; its precise underlying neural mechanisms are still unclear. Taking advantage of the link between increased striatal dopamine and spontaneous blinking (Groman et al, 2014; Karson, 1988), Terhune and colleagues reported an apparent behavioural correlate of the influence of dopaminergic activity in human reports of duration They presented evidence for transient variations in duration estimation in the sub- and supra-second range, with participants systematically biased towards reporting durations as longer immediately after spontaneous blinking, as compared to when no prior blink was present (Terhune et al, 2016). This finding was interpreted as a demonstration of dopaminergic influence on neural ‘clock speed’ or temporal attention, implying that the results

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion