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Object size determines the spatial spread of visual time

Fulcher, Corinne
; 
McGraw, Paul V.
; 
Roach, N.W.
; 
Whitaker, David J.
; 
Heron, James
Publication Date
2016-07-27
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Keywords
Time perception, Spatial selectivity, Duration adaptation, Visual, Size, After-effect
Rights
© 2016 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Yes
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openAccess
Accepted for publication
2016-07-04
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Life Sciences Publications
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Abstract
A key question for temporal processing research is how the nervous system extracts event duration, despite a notable lack of neural structures dedicated to duration encoding. This is in stark contrast with the orderly arrangement of neurons tasked with spatial processing. In this study, we examine the linkage between the spatial and temporal domains. We use sensory adaptation techniques to generate after-effects where perceived duration is either compressed or expanded in the opposite direction to the adapting stimulus’ duration. Our results indicate that these after-effects are broadly tuned, extending over an area approximately five times the size of the stimulus. This region is directly related to the size of the adapting stimulus—the larger the adapting stimulus the greater the spatial spread of the aftereffect. We construct a simple model to test predictions based on overlapping adapted versus non-adapted neuronal populations and show that our effects cannot be explained by any single, fixed-scale neural filtering. Rather, our effects are best explained by a self-scaled mechanism underpinned by duration selective neurons that also pool spatial information across earlier stages of visual processing.
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10454/8751
Version
Published version
Citation
Fulcher C, McGraw PV, Roach NW, Whitaker D and Heron J (2016) Object size determines the spatial spread of visual time. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 283(1835).
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Link to Version of Record
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2016.1024
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Article
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