Abstract
We investigated the influence of attentional inhibition on the perceived duration of a brief visual event. Although attentional capture by an exogenous cue is known to prolong the perceived duration of such an event, it remains unclear whether the attentional inhibition by an exogenous cue (i.e., inhibition of return: IOR) affects temporal perception. To this end, a spatial cuing task and duration judgment were combined. Each trial started with presentation of three horizontally aligned box-shaped stimuli, one of which was then suddenly flashed to serve as a peripheral cue. After one second, a filled square (target) was presented inside the left or right box. The target appeared in the cued side in a third of trials (cued condition), and in the opposite side in another third of trials (uncued condition). In the remaining trials, the cue appeared at the central box and the target appeared at either the left or right box (neutral condition). We measured the perceived duration of the target under these conditions using a matching method and recorded reaction times for target onset as is done in a typical spatial cuing paradigm. The results indicated that the target presented at the cued location was perceived to last shorter than that presented at the uncued location. Furthermore, the reaction time for the cued target was longer than that for the uncued target. Therefore, attentional inhibition induced by an exogenous cue contracted the perceived duration of a brief visual event at the inhibited location. In the pacemaker-accumulator framework, this shortened perceived duration can be explained by an increased miss rate of temporal-unit accumulation or by slowing down of the clock.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016