Time constancy in human perception

Abstract

Estimated time contracts or dilates depending on many visual-stimulation attributes (size, speed, etc.). Here we show that when such attributes are jointly modulated so as to respect the rules of perspective, their effect on the perceived duration of moving objects depends on the presence of contextual information about viewing distance. We show that perceived duration contracts and dilates with changes in the retinal input associated with increasing distance from the observer only when the moving objects are presented in the absence of information about the viewing distance. When this information (in the form of linear perspective cues) is present, the time-contraction/dilation effect is eliminated and time constancy is preserved. This is the first demonstration of a perceptual time constancy, analogous to size constancy but in the time domain. It points to a normalization of time computation operated by the visual brain when stimulated within a quasi-ecological environment.

Effects of background and contour luminance on the hue and brightness of the Watercolor effect

“…Difference scaling is useful for measuring perceptual strength along a single physical dimension, whereas conjoint measurement was conceived to assess the combined effects of several dimensions on appearance (Falmagne, 1985 ;Knoblauch & Maloney, 2012 ;Krantz et al, 1971;Luce & Tukey, 1964;Roberts, 1979). MLCM has been successfully applied to estimate perceptual scales associated with different sets of physical continua including surface material properties (Ho, Landy & Maloney, 2008;Qi, Chantler, Siebert & Dong, 2015;Hansmann-Roth & Mamassian, 2017), color appearance (Gerardin et al, 2014;Rogers, Knoblauch & Franklin, 2016) and time perception (Lisi & Gorea, 2016). The signal detection decision model allows specifying the perceptual scales in terms of the signal detection parameter d' (Gerardin et al, 2014;Knoblauch & Maloney, 2012).…”

Voice and Face Gender Perception engages multimodal integration via multiple feedback pathways

“…MLCM is a scaling method in which paired-comparison judgments are made between stimuli that co-vary simultaneously and independently along ≥ 2 stimulus dimensions (Ho et al, 2008;Knoblauch & Maloney, 2012). MLCM has been used to investigate a diverse set of perceptual processes, including visual surface perception (Hansmann-Roth & Mamassian, 2017;Ho et al, 2008;Qi et al, 2015), stimulus dependence in a visual filling-in illusion (Gerardin et al, 2014;Gerardin et al, 2018), time constancy in perception (Lisi & Gorea, 2016), lightness and chroma perception in adults (Rogers et al, 2016) and infants (Rogers et al, 2018), and perception of light scattering and diffusion in liquids (Chadwick et al, 2018). In the present case, the stimuli are defined as variations in the face and voice gender along a continuum of interpolated faces and voices obtained by morphing the extreme exemplars.…”

Perception and Cognition Are Largely Independent, but Still Affect Each Other in Systematic Ways: Arguments from Evolution and the Consciousness-Attention Dissociation

“…Animals navigate, identify objects, react to color, and have similar sensorial systems. At some point in our evolution, our brains created routines to cognitively guide attention, but these routines cannot directly change early perception due to the requirement of feature constancy for survival, which includes features such as color and time (Lisi and Gorea, 2016). Then, even later in our evolution, we learned to explicitly interpret our perceptual experiences and to linguistically articulate such interpretations in terms of discursive inference (a capacity that seems to be exclusively human).…”