scholarly journals Linear vector models of time perception account for saccade and stimulus novelty interactions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Hossein Ghaderi ◽  
John Douglas Crawford

AbstractVarious models (e.g. scalar, state-dependent network, and vector models) have been proposed to explain the global aspects of time perception, but they have not been tested against specific visual phenomena like perisaccadic time compression and novel stimulus time dilation. Here, we tested how the perceived duration of a novel stimulus is influenced by 1) a simultaneous saccade, in combination with 2) a prior series of repeated stimuli in human participants. This yielded a novel behavioral interaction: pre-saccadic stimulus repetition neutralizes perisaccadic time compression. We then tested these results against simulations of the above models. Our data yielded low correlations against scalar model simulations, high but non-specific correlations for our feedforward neural network, and correlations that were both high and specific for a vector model based on identity of objective and subjective time. These results demonstrate the power of global time perception models in explaining disparate empirical phenomena and suggest that subjective time has a similar essence to time’s physical vector.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feiming Li ◽  
Lei Wang ◽  
Lei Jia ◽  
Jiahao Lu ◽  
Youping Wu ◽  
...  

Previous research has demonstrated that duration of implied motion (IM) was dilated, whereas hMT+ activity related to perceptual processes on IM stimuli could be modulated by their motion coherence. Based on these findings, the present study aimed to examine whether subjective time perception of IM stimuli would be influenced by varying coherence levels. A temporal bisection task was used to measure the subjective experience of time, in which photographic stimuli showing a human moving in four directions (left, right, toward, or away from the viewer) were presented as probe stimuli. The varying coherence of these IM stimuli was manipulated by changing the percentage of pictures implying movement in one direction. Participants were required to judge whether the duration of probe stimulus was more similar to the long or short pre-presented standard duration. As predicted, the point of subjective equality was significantly modulated by the varying coherence of the IM stimuli, but not for no-IM stimuli. This finding suggests that coherence level might be a key mediating factor for perceived duration of IM images, and top-down perceptual stream from inferred motion could influence subjective experience of time perception.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shrikanth Kulashekhar ◽  
Sarah Maass ◽  
Hedderik van Rijn ◽  
Domenica Bueti

Abstract Neuronal tuning and topography are mechanisms widely used in the brain to represent sensory information and also abstract features like time. In humans, temporal topography has been shown in a wide circuit of brain regions. However, it is unclear whether chronotopic maps are specific to vision, whether they map time in an absolute or relative fashion, to what extent they reflect objective or subjective time and whether they are influenced by temporal context. Here we asked human participants to reproduce the durations of sounds in two, partially overlapping, temporal contexts while we record high-spatial resolution fMRI. Both model-based and data driven analyses show the presence of auditory chronomaps in the auditory parabelt, intraparietal sulcus, and in supplementary motor area. Most importantly, when the same physical duration is presented in different temporal contexts, and thus perceived differently, different neuronal units respond to it. Those units are also spatially shifted according to the relative position of the perceived duration within each context. Finally, the pattern of activity is more similar within rather than across contexts suggesting their pivotal role in shaping the maps. These results highlight two important properties of chronomaps: their flexibility of representation and their dependency on the context.


Author(s):  
Maxine T. Sherman ◽  
Zafeirios Fountas ◽  
Anil K. Seth ◽  
Warrick Roseboom

AbstractHuman experience of time exhibits systematic, context-dependent deviations from objective clock time, for example, time is experienced differently at work than on holiday. However, leading explanations of time perception are not equipped to explain these deviations. Here we test the idea that these deviations arise because time estimates are constructed by accumulating the same quantity that guides perception: salient events. To test this, healthy human participants watched naturalistic, silent videos and estimated their duration while fMRI was acquired. Using computational modelling, we show that accumulated events in visual, auditory and somatosensory cortex all predict ‘clock time’, but duration biases reflecting human experience of time could only be predicted from the region involved in modality-specific sensory processing: visual cortex. Our results reveal that human subjective time is based on information arising during the processing of our dynamic sensory environment, providing a computational basis for an end-to-end account of time perception.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 363-380
Author(s):  
Tutku Öztel ◽  
Fuat Balcı

Our subjective experience of time intervals is susceptible to the effects of the various properties of the timed stimuli/events (e.g., motion, size, affect). For instance, subjective time is considerably lengthened when observing faster and shortened when observing slower walking animations. Such effects on perceived time have been investigated widely in the field. What we do not know based on these studies is if participants are aware of these sorts of stimulus-induced timing illusions. Thus, the current study, using confidence ratings, investigated whether the participants are aware of their largely biased time perception induced by the observed walking speed in a temporal bisection task. After each categorization of a probe interval as ‘short’ or ‘long’, we asked participants to rate their confidence level regarding their categorization. We reasoned that if participants were aware of their biased time perception, the temporal modulation of confidence ratings regarding their categorization performance would not change between different walking speed conditions. We found that confidence ratings closely tracked shifts in the psychometric functions suggesting that participants were not aware of the stimulus-induced warping of perceived time. We replicated these findings in a second experiment. Our results show that human participants are not aware of the stimulus-induced temporal illusions they experience.


2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gal Zauberman ◽  
B. Kyu Kim ◽  
Selin A. Malkoc ◽  
James R. Bettman

Consumers often make decisions about outcomes and events that occur over time. This research examines consumers' sensitivity to the prospective duration relevant to their decisions and the implications of such sensitivity for intertemporal trade-offs, especially the degree of present bias (i.e., hyperbolic discounting). The authors show that participants' subjective perceptions of prospective duration are not sufficiently sensitive to changes in objective duration and are nonlinear and concave in objective time, consistent with psychophysical principles. More important, this lack of sensitivity can explain hyperbolic discounting. The results replicate standard hyperbolic discounting effects with respect to objective time but show a relatively constant rate of discounting with respect to subjective time perceptions. The results are replicated between subjects (Experiment 1) and within subjects (Experiments 2), with multiple time horizons and multiple descriptors, and with different measurement orders. Furthermore, the authors show that when duration is primed, subjective time perception is altered (Experiment 4) and hyperbolic discounting is reduced (Experiment 3).


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Suárez-Pinilla ◽  
Kyriacos Nikiforou ◽  
Zafeirios Fountas ◽  
Anil K. Seth ◽  
Warrick Roseboom

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.


1967 ◽  
Vol 24 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1235-1240 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. McGrath ◽  
James F. O'Hanlon

A method was developed for measuring rate of subjective time ( RST). Subjective time ( T) was recorded in subjects making a series of contiguous estimations of a standard interval of time. The results showed that T generally increased as a linear function of real time ( t). RST was measured by describing T as a linear function of t and by differentiating that function in respect to t. Individual differences in RST were large and stable within a test session. The differences were reliable from one session to the next. Within the range studied (1 to 10 min.) the duration of the standard interval had no systematic effect upon RSTs. And, RSTs were related in the appropriate direction to traditional measures of time perception. It was concluded that the RST is a useful measure for research on time perception.


SAGE Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402093990
Author(s):  
Lingjing Li ◽  
Yu Tian

In the domain of aesthetic preference, previous studies focused primarily on exploring the factors that influence aesthetic preference while neglecting to investigate whether aesthetic preference affects other psychological activities. This study sought to expand our understanding of time perception by examining whether aesthetic preference in viewing paintings influenced its perceived duration. Participants who preferred Chinese paintings ( n = 20) and participants who preferred western paintings ( n = 21) were recruited to complete a temporal reproduction task that measured their time perception of Chinese paintings and of western paintings. The results showed that participants who preferred Chinese paintings exhibited longer time perceptions for Chinese paintings than for western paintings, while the participants who preferred western paintings exhibited longer time perceptions for western paintings than for Chinese paintings. These results suggested that aesthetic preference could modulate our perceived duration of painting presentation. Specifically, individuals perceive longer painting presentation durations when exposed to the stimuli matching their aesthetic preferences.


2005 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 921-935 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Wittmann ◽  
Sandra Lehnhoff

Despite the widespread belief that the subjective speed of the passage of time increases with age, empirical results are controversial. In this study, a combination of questionnaires was employed to assess subjective time perception by 499 subjects, ages 14 to 94 years. Pearson correlations and nonlinear regression analyses on a variety of questionnaires and the age of the participants show that the momentary perception of the passage of time and the retrospective judgment of past periods of time are a function of chronological age; however, small-to-moderate effects accounted for at most 10% of the variance. Results generally support the widespread perception that the passage of time speeds up with age. These results are discussed in the context of models of prospective and retrospective time judgment, but interpretations have to be treated with caution given methodological limitations.


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