Scene and Object Violations Cause Subjective Time Dilation

Abstract

For a given physical duration, certain events can be experienced as subjectively longer than others, an illusion referred to as subjective time dilation. Many factors have been shown to lead to this illusion in perceived duration, including low-level visual properties of the stimulus (e.g., increase in motion, brightness, and flicker), an unexpected stimulus in a sequence of events, as well as affective factors. Here we report the results of two experiments in which we tested for the influence of scene and object knowledge on subjective time dilation. Based on the results of earlier studies, we predicted that visual scenes and objects containing semantic violations would be judged as lasting longer than control stimuli. The findings from both experiments indicate that stimuli containing semantic violations were judged to be present for longer than stimuli without semantic violations. We interpret our results to mean that neural processes that encode for perception of duration can operate on conceptually integrated scene and object representations. We further conjecture that the underlying neural code for duration perception is likely correlated with the amplitude of neural activity expended on the processing of incoming sensory information.