Abstract
Typically, research in time perception has disregarded the effect that multiple simultaneous elements may have on the duration of an event. However, real life situations are complex, and irrelevant external information can affect our time estimates when we try to assess the duration of specific relevant events. Here, we have examined how the duration of simultaneous irrelevant elements can affect the duration judgement of a relevant target. The channel theory proposes that there are multiple neural structures that respond selectively to different ranges of preferred durations. We hypothesize that these different channels may be simultaneously activated by the attended target and also by distractors. The strength of this parallel activation could be modulated by the similarity in duration between distractors and targets. We designed a task in which participants (n=22) had to observe pairs of sequences each consisting of a visual test target and a set of four distractors. Participants were asked to compare the duration of the two test targets ignoring the distractors and judge which of them was presented for a longer time. The duration of the test targets was always the same (1 s), but the set of distractors could be presented for either 0.3, 0.7, 1.5 or 3 s in each sequence. Results show that, in most cases, participants tend to average the duration of the different elements on the scene, regardless of their relevance to the task. Therefore, they judged two identical targets as being presented for a different time depending on the duration of distractors in each sequence. Building on the channel theory, we propose a model that allows us to estimate a leaking parameter that describes the rate at which the influence of the interfering information from distractors decreases as a function of the duration difference between distractors and target.