Larger Stimuli Require Longer Processing Time for Perception

Abstract

The time it takes for a stimulus to reach awareness is often assessed by measuring reaction times (RTs) or by a temporal order judgement (TOJ) task in which perceived timing is compared against a reference stimulus. Dissociations of RT and TOJ have been reported earlier in which increases in stimulus intensity such as luminance intensity results in a decrease of RT, whereas perceived perceptual latency in a TOJ task is affected to a lesser degree. Here, we report that a simple manipulation of stimulus size has stronger effects on perceptual latency measured by TOJ than on motor latency measured by RT tasks. When participants were asked to respond to the appearance of a simple stimulus such as a luminance blob, the perceptual latency measured against a standard reference stimulus was up to 40 ms longer for a larger stimulus. In other words, the smaller stimulus was perceived to occur earlier than the larger one. RT on the other hand was hardly affected by size. The TOJ results were further replicated in a simultaneity judgement task, suggesting that the effects of size are not due to TOJ-specific response biases but more likely reflect an effect on perceived timing.

The effect of space on subjective time is mediated by apparent velocity

“…Experiment 3 also showed that intervals defined by spatially extended objects are generally overestimated, irrespective of whether interval markers are presented in succession or simultaneously or whether intervals are defined by extended objects. The latter finding is consistent with studies reporting time overestimation for larger objects (Mo & Michalski, 1972;Thomas & Cantor, 1976;Xuan et al, 2007;Ono & Kitazawa, 2009;Rammsayer & Verner, 2014;Kanai et al, 2017). This result suggests that temporal duration is generally retrieved by integrating space and speed, not only when interval markers are flashed but also for stationary objects with on-and offsets.…”

“…However, we show that it might be a general mechanism for visual duration estimation that can illuminate why temporal estimates are biased by parameters that seem irrelevant for duration estimations. Since the influences of spatial extent (Mo & Michalski, 1972;Thomas & Cantor, 1976;Xuan et al, 2007;Ono & Kitazawa, 2009;Rammsayer & Verner, 2014;Kanai et al, 2017) and of velocity (Kaneko & Murakami, 2009;Tomassini et al, 2011, Bruno et al, 2015Gorea & Kim, 2015;Yamamoto & Miura, 2016) on temporal estimates are well documented, one must answer the question why the brain should undertake the apparent extra effort of taking these signals into account.…”

“…Evidence showing that a motion mechanism might provide temporal estimates comes from studies demonstrating influences of speed and space on time. Many studies have demonstrated that either speed (Kaneko & Murakami, 2009;Tomassini, Gori, Burr, Sandini, & Morrone, 2011;Bruno, Ayhan, & Johnston, 2015;Gorea & Kim, 2015;Yamamoto & Miura, 2016) or spatial extent (Mo & Michalski, 1972;Thomas & Cantor, 1976;Xuan, Zhang, He, & Chen, 2007;Ono & Kitazawa, 2009;Rammsayer & Verner, 2014;Kanai, Dalmaijer, Sherman, Kawakita, & Paffen, 2017) influence duration estimations.…”

The Time Is Up: Compression of Visual Time Interval Estimations of Bimodal Aperiodic Patterns

“…The ability to estimate the duration of an event is fundamental for many of our sensory and motor behaviors such as talking, walking or even cooking, and dancing. However, such ability can be altered by magnitude, beat, sensory congruity, or saliency of an event (Xuan et al, 2007 ; van Wassenhove et al, 2008 ; Grube and Griffiths, 2009 ; Kösem et al, 2012 ; Kanai et al, 2017 ). Nevertheless, to understand how the brain estimates the duration of processes, linked to human behavior, such as how music intervals create the perception of the beat (Pashler, 2001 ) and rhythm (Geiser et al, 2014 ), requires studying temporal estimations of aperiodic (AP) patterns in different contexts and models.…”

Size and orientation cue figure-ground segregation in infants

“…We chose to study orientation and size information as cues because (as noted) there is evidence that adults use these cues to achieve figure-ground segregation, with horizontal/vertical orientations and small size inducing figure perception (Oyama, 1960; Rubin, 1958). Why the horizontal/vertical and small values along the orientation and size attributes are perceived as figure is unknown, although horizontal and vertical tend to be perceived as unique categories along the orientation continuum (Quinn, 2004), and small-sized stimuli tend to be perceived as distinctive (Coren, Porac, & Ward, 1984) and require less processing time (Kanai, Dalmaijer, Sherman, Kawakita, & Paffen, 2017). In addition, there are data indicating that infants are sensitive to differences between horizontal/vertical and oblique orientations (Quinn & Bomba, 1986) and also to differences in object size (Libertus et al, 2013).…”