The aftereffect of perceived duration is contingent on auditory frequency but not visual orientation

Abstract

Recent sensory history plays a critical role in duration perception. It has been established that after adapting to a particular duration, the test durations within a certain range appear to be distorted. To explore whether the aftereffect of perceived duration can be constrained by sensory modality and stimulus feature within a modality, the current study applied the technique of simultaneous sensory adaptation, by which observers were able to simultaneously adapt to two durations defined by two different stimuli. Using both simple visual and auditory stimuli, we found that the aftereffect of perceived duration is modality specific and contingent on auditory frequency but not visual orientation of the stimulus. These results demonstrate that there are independent timers responsible for the aftereffects of perceived duration in each sensory modality. Furthermore, the timer for the auditory modality may be located at a relatively earlier stage of sensory processing than the timer for the visual modality.

Duration adaptation modulates EEG correlates of subsequent temporal encoding

“…In line with previous studies (Heron et al, 2012;Li et al, 2015b;Shima et al, 2016), Experiment 1 showed a strong modulation of duration adaptation. Considering that the duration aftereffect is not observed when the duration of the adapting stimulus matched the duration of the test stimulus, the absence of any significant difference between the "adapt equal" and the "adapt longer" conditions in the present study suggests that there was no duration aftereffect after repetitive exposure to a relatively long stimulus.…”

“…Also, its negative duration aftereffect has been shown to be tuned around the adaptation duration (Heron et al, 2012), contingent on pitch and temporal order (Walker and Irion, 1979), but not on visual orientation (Li et al, 2015b) or visual hemifields (Li et al, 2015a). These results imply that duration adaptation involves modality-dependent and interval-independent clock systems.…”

“…Previous studies have found that duration adaptation occurs in both visual and auditory modalities (Heron et al, 2012;Li et al, 2015b;Walker et al, 1981), for both sub-and supra-second durations (Shima et al, 2016), and precedes multisensory integration (Heron et al, 2013). Also, its negative duration aftereffect has been shown to be tuned around the adaptation duration (Heron et al, 2012), contingent on pitch and temporal order (Walker and Irion, 1979), but not on visual orientation (Li et al, 2015b) or visual hemifields (Li et al, 2015a).…”

Duration Aftereffect Depends on the Duration of Adaptation

“…According to previous studies, the duration aftereffect arises in both vision and audition (Walker et al, 1981; Heron et al, 2012; Li et al, 2015b), with stimuli of both sub- and supra-second visual durations (Shima et al, 2016), is modality specific (Heron et al, 2012; Li et al, 2015b), tuned around the adapting duration (Heron et al, 2012), contingent on pitch and temporal order (Walker and Irion, 1979; Walker et al, 1981), but not on visual orientation (Li et al, 2015b) or visual hemifield (Li et al, 2015a). Because of its analogy with other sensory adaptation phenomena, a neural adaptation model has been proposed to explain this aftereffect of perceived duration (Walker et al, 1981; Heron et al, 2012).…”

Perceived Duration Increases with Contrast, but Only a Little

“…Whilst there are a number of conflicting findings within the visual adaptation literature, the overarching message is that the perception of duration of dynamic visual events appears driven by modality specific mechanisms (Li et al, 2015). Given the fact that adaptation to a stimulus reduces the amount of neural activity associated with that stimulus (Andrews, 1964; Clifford et al, 2007), one simple explanation for the effect of adaptation on perceived duration is that perceived duration of visual stimulus is directly driven by the neural activity elicited with that visual stimulus (Curran and Benton, 2012).…”