To perceive the auditory and visual aspects of a physical event as occurring simultaneously, the brain must adjust for differences between the two modalities in both physical transmission time and sensory processing time. One possible strategy to overcome this difficulty is to adaptively recalibrate the simultaneity point from daily experience of audiovisual events. Here we report that after exposure to a fixed audiovisual time lag for several minutes, human participants showed shifts in their subjective simultaneity responses toward that particular lag. This 'lag adaptation' also altered the temporal tuning of an auditory-induced visual illusion, suggesting that adaptation occurred via changes in sensory processing, rather than as a result of a cognitive shift while making task responses. Our findings suggest that the brain attempts to adjust subjective simultaneity across different modalities by detecting and reducing time lags between inputs that likely arise from the same physical events.

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The world is full of surfaces, and by looking at them we can judge their material qualities. Properties such as colour or glossiness can help us decide whether a pancake is cooked, or a patch of pavement is icy. Most studies of surface appearance have emphasized textureless matte surfaces, but real-world surfaces, which may have gloss and complex mesostructure, are now receiving increased attention. Their appearance results from a complex interplay of illumination, reflectance and surface geometry, which are difficult to tease apart given an image. If there were simple image statistics that were diagnostic of surface properties it would be sensible to use them. Here we show that the skewness of the luminance histogram and the skewness of sub-band filter outputs are correlated with surface gloss and inversely correlated with surface albedo (diffuse reflectance). We find evidence that human observers use skewness, or a similar measure of histogram asymmetry, in making judgements about surfaces. When the image of a surface has positively skewed statistics, it tends to appear darker and glossier than a similar surface with lower skewness, and this is true whether the skewness is inherent to the original image or is introduced by digital manipulation. We also find a visual after-effect based on skewness: adaptation to patterns with skewed statistics can alter the apparent lightness and glossiness of surfaces that are subsequently viewed. We suggest that there are neural mechanisms sensitive to skewed statistics, and that their outputs can be used in estimating surface properties.

A fundamental question about the perception of time is whether the neural mechanisms underlying temporal judgements are universal and centralized in the brain or modality specific and distributed. Time perception has traditionally been thought to be entirely dissociated from spatial vision. Here we show that the apparent duration of a dynamic stimulus can be manipulated in a local region of visual space by adapting to oscillatory motion or flicker. This implicates spatially localized temporal mechanisms in duration perception. We do not see concomitant changes in the time of onset or offset of the test patterns, demonstrating a direct local effect on duration perception rather than an indirect effect on the time course of neural processing. The effects of adaptation on duration perception can also be dissociated from motion or flicker perception per se. Although 20 Hz adaptation reduces both the apparent temporal frequency and duration of a 10 Hz test stimulus, 5 Hz adaptation increases apparent temporal frequency but has little effect on duration perception. We conclude that there is a peripheral, spatially localized, essentially visual component involved in sensing the duration of visual events.