The relationship between the duration of a stimulus and the duration of a perception

Abstract

The time-course of the perception of visual and auditory stimuli has been studied by means of the analysis of the temporal errors in the judgement of the simultaneity of the offset of the first stimulus and the onset of the second stimulus in the same modality. The duration of the first stimulus is the independent variable and the magnitude of the subject's error is the dependent variable. The error analysis for the stimuli which were used indicates that both auditory and visual perceptions have a minimum duration, produced by stimuli of 120–130 msec or less, and that perceptions evoked by stimuli longer than this critical value are continuously graded with respect to duration. No evidence could be found to support the idea that perceptual durations are quantized in the temporal domain.