Time-shrinking, its propagation, and Gestalt principles

Abstract

When a relatively short empty time interval is preceded by an even shorter one, its duration can be underestimated remarkably. This phenomenon, called time-shrinking, has been investigated with patterns consisting of two time intervals. In five experiments, we investigated whether underestimation of the last interval would occur when it was preceded by two time intervals. Significant underestimations of the last interval occurred in some of those patterns. The influence of the second preceding interval was dominant, but in some patterns, the first preceding interval could shrink the subjective duration of the last time interval directly. The first interval could also affect perception of the duration of the last one indirectly by shrinking the second interval, as a result of which the latter either shrank the last interval more strongly or became too short to shrink it. There were two types of temporal patterns in which the perceived duration of the last interval could not be explained by time-shrinking or its propagation through the pattern. It seemed plausible that auditory Gestalt principles invoked strong figural organizations in these patterns, which rendered the time-shrinking mechanism inoperative.

Duration perception in crossmodally-defined intervals

“…Because in our experiment we asked participants to compare crossmodally-defined empty intervals to filled auditory intervals, we have been able to limit the influence of possible biases such as temporal shrinking (Nakajima et al, 1991cited in Nakajima et al, 2004Sasaki et al, 2002), temporal stretching (Sasaki et al, 2010), and temporal ventriloquism effects (Morein-Zamir, 2003). The psychophysical findings on duration perception of crossmodally-defined intervals in our study are overall consistent with previous work (i.e., Grondin & Rousseau, 1991).…”

“…If three signals are presented in succession the duration of the interval marked by the second and third signal is underestimated. Sasaki et al (2002) reported that temporal shrinking of the last interval occurs as well when four signals mark three intervals. If we had used two empty intervals in our 2IFC task participants could have interpreted that as a train of four signals.…”

“…The filled interval was a continuous sound that lasted for 30%, 60%, 80%, 100%, 120%, 140%, and 170% of the duration of the empty interval. We used the combination of empty and filled intervals within a trial to control for perceptual time perception biases such as temporal shrinking (Nakajima, ten Hoopen, & van der Wilk, 1991cited in Nakajima et al, 2004Sasaki, Suetomi, Nakajima, & ten Hoopen, 2002), temporal stretching (Sasaki et al, 2010) or temporal ventriloquism (Morein-Zamir, 2003) which were likely to occur if we had asked participants to compare two empty intervals. Temporal shrinking refers to a perceptual bias that occurs when a train of three or four brief signals are presented.…”

Minding time in an amodal representational space

“…click train) or events at a faster rate are judged longer than an empty interval or an interval containing less or slower discrete elements, respectively ( Fraisse 1957;Goldstone & Lhamon 1976). Numerous cases of subjective time distortions ('dilation' when objective time is overestimated, 'compression' when it is underestimated) have recently been reported using different paradigms across sensory and motor modalities (Rose & Summers 1995;Yarrow et al 2001Yarrow et al , 2004Hodinott-Hill et al 2002;Sasaki et al 2002;Park et al 2003;Tse et al 2004;Morrone et al 2005;van Wassenhove et al 2008). For example, an oddball within a stream of standard events of identical duration is perceived as longer than a standard event ( Tse et al 2004).…”

Effects of deviation from isochronism on the durational shrinkage by noise replacement

“…In terms of shrinkage, we are reminded of a series of studies by Nakajima and his colleagues on the time shrinking illusion [10][11][12]. It is worth noting that their time shrinking is a completely different phenomenon from our durational shrinkage.…”