Measurements of perceived time of visual events
Pascal Mamassian
CNRS & Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Visual perception is not instantaneous. It takes a few milliseconds for light to be transduced in photoreceptors and tens of milliseconds more for neuronal spikes to occur at successive levels of the visual hierarchy. These delays necessarily impact our abiity to perceive time. I will present examples of human time perception from two classes of tasks, duration estimation and perceived time of an event. In duration estimation, we have shown that observers are able to estimate the duration of an interval even when the onset of that interval is not explictly provided. In perceived time, we have shown that the perceived time of an event is influenced by other events in their temporal proximity, and that this perceived time varies across the visual field. A better understanding of our sensitivity to and biases in the perception of time is important to fully appreciate how well we understand our sensory environment