The functional role of time compression.

Eckart Zimmermann,Christina Derichs,Gereon R Fink

doi:10.1038/srep25843

Eckart Zimmermann, Christina Derichs + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep25843

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Abstract

Multisensory integration provides continuous and stable perception from separate sensory inputs. Here, we investigated the functional role of temporal binding between the visual and the tactile senses. To this end we used the paradigm of compression that induces shifts in time when probe stimuli are degraded, e.g., by a visual mask (Zimmermann et al. 2014). Subjects had to estimate the duration of temporal intervals of 500 ms defined by a tactile and a visual, masked stimulus. We observed a strong (~100 ms) underestimation of the temporal interval when the stimuli from both senses appeared to occur at the same position in space. In contrast, when the positions of the visual and tactile stimuli were spatially separate, interval perception was almost veridical. Temporal compression furthermore depended on the correspondence of probe features and was absent when the orientation of the tactile and visual probes was incongruent. An additional experiment revealed that temporal compression also occurs when objects were presented outside the attentional focus. In conclusion, these data support a role for spatiotemporal binding in temporal compression, which is at least in part selective for object features.

Highlights

Multisensory integration provides continuous and stable perception from separate sensory inputs
Despite the ecological relevance to correctly judge temporal durations, several illusions demonstrate a surprisingly strong susceptibility to interference resulting in altered time perception: Temporal intervals appear compressed during voluntary actions[1], eye movements[2], and shifts of attention[3,4,5]
We first sought to investigate whether binding of stimuli across the visual and the tactile senses might produce temporal compression

Summary

Introduction

Multisensory integration provides continuous and stable perception from separate sensory inputs. We investigated the functional role of temporal binding between the visual and the tactile senses To this end we used the paradigm of compression that induces shifts in time when probe stimuli are degraded, e.g., by a visual mask (Zimmermann et al 2014). Multisensory binding has been investigated with temporal order judgements in a visual-tactile version of the ventriloquism effect[13]. The precision of these judgments was more accurate when the visual and tactile stimuli were presented in different spatial locations rather than in the same location, suggesting multisensory integration into a unitary percept[14].

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