Action-Induced Compression in the Perceived Time of Visual Events

Duygu Özbağcı & İnci Ayhan
  • Perceived duration of visual events are known to be changed by relevant modality-specific actions, such as eye movements. Some activities such as driving, however, may require a rather action-linked multimodal calibration with the transient visual system. Here, we tested the effect of keypress on the perceived duration of visual events in a duration reproduction paradigm, where an array of dots either accelerated (1-9deg/sec), decelerated (9-1deg/sec) or moved with a constant speed (5deg/sec) while participants were pressing a key. As a control, we also asked participants to reproduce the perceived time of the same visual events they generated in the visuo-motor condition, while this time in a pure visual condition. Results showed that, in all speed conditions, reproduced durations get compressed in the presence of an accompanying movement with respect to baseline values, providing further evidence for action-induced distortions in the perceived time of visual events.