Time on your hands: Perceived duration of sensory events is biased toward concurrent actions.

Abstract

Perceptual systems must rapidly generate accurate representations of the world from sensory inputs that are corrupted by internal and external noise. We can typically obtain more veridical representations by integrating information from multiple channels, but this integration can lead to biases when inputs are, in fact, not from the same source. While a considerable amount is known about how different sources of information are combined to influence what we perceive, it is not known whether temporal features are combined. It is vital to address this question given the divergent predictions made by different models of cue combination and time perception concerning the plausibility of crossmodal temporal integration, and the implications that such integration would have for research programmes in action control and social cognition. Here we present four experiments investigating the influence of movement duration on the perceived duration of an auditory tone. Participants either explicitly (Experiments 1-2) or implicitly (Experiments 3-4) produced hand movements of shorter or longer durations, while judging the duration of a concurrently presented tone (500-950 ms in duration). Across all experiments, judgments of tone duration were attracted towards the duration of executed movements (i.e., tones were perceived to be longer when executing a movement of longer duration). Our results demonstrate that temporal information associated with movement biases perceived auditory duration, placing important constraints on theories modelling cue integration for state estimation, as well as models of time perception, action control and social cognition.

Movement Improves the Quality of Temporal Perception and Decision Making

“…For the middle and most ambiguous interval in the stimulus set, choice location could be determined well before the stimulus offset occurred. Notably, longer movements on these trials more often led subjects to classify the stimulus as "long", concordant with previous findings (Yokosaka et al, 2015;Yon et al, 2017). However, even when taking this into account, the divergence between target proximities is striking, with a separation by 1500ms into the trial that is predictive of choice.…”

“…Previous work has begun to demonstrate a strong influence of the motor system on temporal processing. A variety of studies now demonstrate how movement parameters can influence the perceived duration of a stimulus, with longer movements typically associated with longer perceived durations (Yon et al, 2017;Yokosaka et al, 2015;Hagura et al, 2012). We find some support for this in our paradigm, with freemovement subjects classifying auditory tones as "long" more often when their arm movements during the interval were also longer.…”

“…In a separate vein, Tomassini and colleagues (Tomassini et al (2015); (Tomassini et al, 2017) have shown an improvement in the perception of visual contrast during movement preparation and execution; however, this improvement varies sinusoidally (~4Hz) around the time of movement, suggesting a linkage with visual sampling mechanisms (Busch and VanRullen, 2010). Further work by Yon and colleagues (Yon et al, 2017) demonstrated that concurrent movements while timing a sub-second auditory stimulus, a closer analogue to the present task, also shifted the perception of duration, depending on the length, speed, or direction of the movement; however, no overall differences in precision were detected between different movement conditions. Notably, these authors did observe a change in precision in one experiment, with subjects exhibiting better precision when not moving compared to moving, opposite to what we observed here.…”

“…Remarkably, recent studies show that our perception of time depends on whether we are moving or not (Imaizumi and Asai, 2017) (Tomassini et al, 2012) (Tomassini et al, 2014) (Yokosaka et al, 2015) (Press et al, 2014) (Yon et al, 2017 (Hagura et al, 2012) (Tomassini and Morrone, 2016). Prolonged movements serve to expand the perceived duration of a concurrently presented stimulus (Yokosaka et al, 2015), and perceptual judgments of time tend to gravitate towards the length of our motor movements (Press et al, 2014), even when these movements are not tied to the task in any way (Yon et al, 2017). These distortions can also occur when viewing the movements of other people, and can further be altered by the sense of agency a viewer has during the observation (Imaizumi and Asai, 2017).…”

Neural correlates of time distortion in a preaction period

“…These are known as examples in which actions distort our perception of time. Although an increasing number of studies have accumulated behavioral evidence for this actioninduced time distortion (Hagura, Kanai, Orgs, & Haggard, 2012;Iwasaki et al, 2017;Merchant & Yarrow, 2016;Morrone, Ross, & Burr, 2005;Press, Berlot, Bird, Ivry, & Cook, 2014;Tomassini & Morrone, 2016;Yokosaka, Kuroki, Nishida, & Watanabe, 2015;Yon, Edey, Ivry, & Press, 2017), no study has revealed specific neural mechanisms underlying it.…”