Shortening of subjective visual intervals followed by repetitive stimulation

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 6; no. 12; p. e28722
• Main Authors: Ono, Fuminori, Kitazawa, Shigeru
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 16.12.2011; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Biology; Brain research; Decision making; Experimental psychology; Experiments; Flicker; Humans; Intervals; Medicine; Memory; Perceptions; Photic Stimulation; Psychology; Receptive field; Sensory stimulation; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Studies; Task Performance and Analysis; Temporal perception; Trends; Visual perception; Visual Perception - physiology; Visual stimuli
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028722

Our previous research demonstrated that repetitive tone stimulation shortened the perceived duration of the preceding auditory time interval. In this study, we examined whether repetitive visual stimulation influences the perception of preceding visual time intervals. Results showed that a time interval followed by a high-frequency visual flicker was perceived as shorter than that followed by a low-frequency visual flicker. The perceived duration decreased as the frequency of the visual flicker increased. The visual flicker presented in one hemifield shortened the apparent time interval in the other hemifield. A final experiment showed that repetitive tone stimulation also shortened the perceived duration of preceding visual time intervals. We concluded that visual flicker shortened the perceived duration of preceding visual time intervals in the same way as repetitive auditory stimulation shortened the subjective duration of preceding tones.