Crossmodal duration perception involves perceptual grouping, temporal ventriloquism, and variable internal clock rates

Abstract

Here, we investigate how audiovisual context affects perceived event duration with experiments in which observers reported which of two stimuli they perceived as longer. Target events were visual and/or auditory and could be accompanied by nontargets in the other modality. Our results demonstrate that the temporal information conveyed by irrelevant sounds is automatically used when the brain estimates visual durations but that irrelevant visual information does not affect perceived auditory duration (Experiment 1). We further show that auditory influences on subjective visual durations occur only when the temporal characteristics of the stimuli promote perceptual grouping (Experiments 1 and 2). Placed in the context of scalar expectancy theory of time perception, our third and fourth experiments have the implication that audiovisual context can lead both to changes in the rate of an internal clock and to temporal ventriloquism-like effects on perceived on- and offsets. Finally, intramodal grouping of auditory stimuli diminished any crossmodal effects, suggesting a strong preference for intramodal over crossmodal perceptual grouping (Experiment 5).

Audiovisual interactions depend on context of congruency

“…This result, in accordance with previous studies (e.g., Klink et al, 2011;Shams, Kamitani, & Shimojo, 2000, suggests that the auditory stimulus altered the perception of the visual stimulus when the two synchronously presented stimuli were incongruent in duration.…”

“…Note that the results of Experiment 1 are consistent with the outcome of a recent study reported by Klink et al (2011), who showed that the perceived duration of a visual stimulus depended on the duration of an auditory stimulus presented synchronously. Accordingly, given that audition dominates vision in the processing of temporal information, we argue that perceived visual duration in our study was biased towards the perceived duration of the auditory input (e.g., Romei, De Haas, Mok, & Driver, 2011;Shams et al, 2000Shams et al, , 2002Walker & Scott, 1981).…”

“…Note also that other studies using tasks similar to ours have also used accuracy as their main dependent variable (e.g., Klink et al, 2011;Shams, Kamitani, & Shimojo, 2002). In any case, the analyses on the RT data from Experiments 1-4 did not reveal any statistically significant effect.…”

“…In Experiment 1, we developed an audiovisual task that resulted in a congruency effect whereby the perceived duration of a visual stimulus was modulated by the synchronous presentation of an auditory stimulus of the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) duration (see Klink, Montijn, & van Wezel, 2011, for a somewhat similar procedure). The data showed more accurate performance on congruent than on incongruent trials, revealing a congruency effect similar to the one reported in previous studies (e.g., Fairhall & Macaluso, 2009).…”

A neural hierarchy for illusions of time: Duration adaptation precedes multisensory integration

“…The former occurs when perceived visual duration is pulled in the direction of concurrently presented-but physically discrepant-auditory durations (Chen & Yeh, 2009;Klink, Montijn, & van Wezel, 2011). The latter arises when recent sensory history contains consistent duration information.…”