Simultaneous time and size perception

Abstract

Judgments of the apparent duration and size of visually presented circles vary directly with the duration and size of the presented stimuli. When the frequencies of stimulus duration (short vs. long) and stimulus area (small vs. large) are varied, perceived size and duration are directly related to the frequency of the lower attribute value (short or small). These data are compared to the predictions of different information-processing models. The model which accounts for the data best is one in which it is assumed that perceived size and perceived duration grow together over the course of time spent sampling size information, and that attribute frequency affects the rate of sampling and/or the point at which.sampling stops.In an attempt to explain the role of nontemporal stimulus information in the estimation of brief stimulus durations «100 msec), the suggestion has been made that estimates of duration are affected by the time spent processing nontemporal information (Avant, Lyman, & Antes, 1975;Thomas & Weaver, 1975). The validity of this suggestion has been explored in a recent study by Thomas and Cantor (1975) in which subjects were presented with solid circles varying in size (nontemporal information) and in duration, and were asked to judge the size and the duration of the stimuli. This study shows that perceived duration is directly related to stimulus size, and perceived size is directly related to stimulus duration. A model was proposed for the processing of size information, which accounts for both sets of judgments reasonably well. What these data support is not merely a processing model, but the model plus the assumption that processing time is directly related to perceived duration.Having judgments of both stimulus attributes, duration and size, allows one to investigate the effect of size on perceived duration and the dual effect of duration on perceived size. This, in turn, leads to stronger tests of the present approach than would be possible if only duration estimates were available. Further tests of the approach are possible when the range of tasks is extended and when a variety of processing models are examined. This is the tack pursued in the present study. In the Thomas and Cantor (1975) study, the subject's perception of one stimulus attribute was related to the objective values of the other attribute; for example, perceived duration was related to stimulus size. In the present study, the design allows, in addition, perceived duration to be related to perceived size of a given stimulus, as the frequencies of stimulus attributes are varied. Variation in attribute frequency has been This research was supported by Grant No. GB-43175 from the National Science Foundation to the first author. We wish to thank Gordon H. Bower, Barbara Sakitt, and the referees for helpful comments. employed very recently by Mo (1975) in a study of the effects of numerosity on temporal judgments.To fix ideas, suppose that a stimulus consists of a circle, which has size Al or A 2 (>A I ) , presented for a duration...

Sleeping with the enemy: Clock monitoring in the maintenance of insomnia

“…We offer two tentative explanations for this finding. The first is based on the finding that time seems longer as the number of units of information processed per unit of time is increased (Thomas & Cantor, 1976). As the clock-monitors had to process more information as a function of the clockmonitoring task and as they also worried more about how long it was taking them to fall asleep, this group is likely to have processed more information units, which may have constituted a psychological basis for time overestimation.…”

Emotions Evoked by Viewing Pictures may Affect Temporal Aspects of Visual Processing

“…Previous studies have found that perception of temporal duration depends upon various factors. That is, perceived duration increased with frequency of attending to the lapse of time (Fraisse, 1984), perceived numbers of events during that period (Brown, 1995;Fraisse, 1984;Poynter, 1989), perceived size of the stimulus (Ono & Kawahara, 2007;Thomas & Cantor, 1975, 1976, the number denoted by a stimulus (Xuan, Zhan, He, & Chen, 2007), and the amount of energy expended by neurons required to process perceptual stimuli during the period (Eagleman, 2008;Pariyadath & Eagleman, 2007). Strong emotion is also a factor affecting elongation of perceived duration.…”

Estimated duration for rotating-spot-pattern

“…The estimate for stationary pattern was usually smaller than that for a moving pattern but larger than that for a slowly moving pattern. There have been found other effects of stimulus attributes upon the duration estimation, such as numerosity (Mo, 1971), size (Thomas & Cantor, 1976), complexity (Ornstein, 1969), frequency (Thomas & Brown, 1974), and familiarity (Avant, Lyman, & Antes, 1975). Some ingenious investigators have proposed some models and hypotheses to account for their effects (Fraisse, 1963;Ornstein, 1969;Thomas & Weaver, 1975;Block, 1978Block, , 1979.…”