Time on Your Hands: Perceived Duration of Sensory Events Is Biased Toward Concurrent Actions

Perceptual systems must rapidly generate accurate representations of the world from sensory inputs that are corrupted by internal and external noise. We can typically obtain more veridical representations by integrating information from multiple channels, but this integration can lead to biases when...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. General 2017-02, Vol.146 (2), p.182-193
Main Authors: Yon, Daniel, Edey, Rosanna, Ivry, Richard B, Press, Clare
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Attention
Auditory Perception
Cognition & reasoning
Cues
Experimental psychology
Female
Human
Humans
Influence
Judgment
Male
Motor Processes
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perceptual Motor Processes
Psychomotor Performance
Sensory Integration
Sensory perception
Time Perception
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Summary:Perceptual systems must rapidly generate accurate representations of the world from sensory inputs that are corrupted by internal and external noise. We can typically obtain more veridical representations by integrating information from multiple channels, but this integration can lead to biases when inputs are, in fact, not from the same source. Although a considerable amount is known about how different sources of information are combined to influence what we perceive, it is not known whether temporal features are combined. It is vital to address this question given the divergent predictions made by different models of cue combination and time perception concerning the plausibility of cross-modal temporal integration, and the implications that such integration would have for research programs in action control and social cognition. Here we present four experiments investigating the influence of movement duration on the perceived duration of an auditory tone. Participants either explicitly (Experiments 1-2) or implicitly (Experiments 3-4) produced hand movements of shorter or longer durations, while judging the duration of a concurrently presented tone (500-950 ms in duration). Across all experiments, judgments of tone duration were attracted toward the duration of executed movements (i.e., tones were perceived to be longer when executing a movement of longer duration). Our results demonstrate that temporal information associated with movement biases perceived auditory duration, placing important constraints on theories modeling cue integration for state estimation, as well as models of time perception, action control and social cognition.
ISSN:0096-3445
1939-2222
DOI:10.1037/xge0000254