Temporal frequency of events rather than speed dilates perceived duration of moving objects

Abstract

In everyday life moving objects often follow irregular or repetitive trajectories for which distinctive events are potentially noticeable. It is known that the perceived duration of moving objects is distorted, but whether the distortion is due to the temporal frequency of the events or to the speed of the objects remains unclear. Disentangling the contribution of these factors to perceived duration distortions is ecologically relevant: if perceived duration were dependent on speed, it should contract with the distance from the observer to the moving objects. Here, we asked observers to estimate the perceived duration of an object rotating at different speeds and radii and found that perceived duration dilated with temporal frequency of rotations, rather than speed (or perceived speed, which we also measured). We also found that the dilation was larger for two than for one object, but the increase was not large enough to make perceived duration independent of the number of objects when expressed as a function of the local frequency (the number of times an object crossed a given location per time unit). These results suggest that perceived duration of natural stimuli containing distinctive events doesn't depend on the distance of the events to the observer.

Detecting Temporal Change in Dynamic Sounds: On the Role of Stimulus Duration, Speed, and Emotion

“…Explicit timing research accords with this speculation. Participants asked to judge the duration of dynamic stimuli demonstrate temporal distortions pointing to an influence of stimulus content or speed ( Eagleman, 2008 ; Matthews, 2011 ; Liverence and Scholl, 2012 ; Linares and Gorea, 2015 ). For example, a greater frequency of loops (i.e., change in content) made by a luminance blob was associated with a lengthening of subjective duration ( Linares and Gorea, 2015 ).…”

“…Traditionally, the study of time perception has relied on simple static stimuli such as tones or images for which participants compared stimulus duration to a reference duration in memory. More recently, researchers have explored time perception with dynamic stimuli such as moving objects ( Kaneko and Murakami, 2009 ; Matthews, 2011 ; Su and Jonikaitis, 2011 ; Linares and Gorea, 2015 ), tones ( Matthews, 2013 ), music ( Firmino et al, 2009 ; Droit-Volet et al, 2010 ; Cocenas-Silva et al, 2011 ; Darlow et al, 2013 ), faces ( Fayolle and Droit-Volet, 2014 ), and vocalizations ( Schirmer et al , in press ). Although ecologically more valid, this approach presents a methodological challenge.…”

Duration estimates within a modality are integrated sub-optimally

“…In our experiments, we utilized the illusory phenomenon that perceived duration is biased by the temporal frequency or speed of a visual stimulus (Kanai et al, 2006 ; Kaneko and Murakami, 2009 ) to manipulate the length of perceived duration without changing the physical duration of a stimulus. There still exists a debate on whether the bias is induced by temporal frequency or speed (Kaneko and Murakami, 2009 ; Linares and Gorea, 2015 ). Our result is independent from the answer to this debate, because the spatial frequency was constant in all stimuli and temporal frequency was proportional to speed in our experiments.…”

A predictive processing model of episodic memory and time perception

“…Reassuringly, the previously reported task-by-cognitive load interaction 7 is apparent in our data (compare Figure 1 and Figure 5B), though in our data it is of a smaller magnitude and is shifted towards overestimation rather than underestimation. This shift towards overestimation was likely due to our experiment using more dynamic stimuli which are known to result in longer duration estimates 4,12,42 (see also Figure 5C). Furthermore, the task-by-load interaction in our data becomes less straightforward when broken down by the different scene types that were used as stimuli (City, campus and outside, and office/cafe) ( Figure 5C).…”