Task A) Binary task used in Experiments 1-2. Illustrative example for a single trial. During a trial, participants indicated whether “more than half” or “less than half” of the duration had passed, at a temporal sampling point that was 55% of the total duration (16.5s). Task B) The double production task used in Experiment 3. First, participants were presented with an empty scene for 30s (ground truth) while performing an auxiliary task (detecting the presence of A or L on screen with a corresponding keypress). Then they were asked to press a key after 30s had elapsed (empty production task). At this point, the empty scene was replaced with a scene in the H-VC or L-VC condition (high or low visual complexity, respectively). After the change of scene, participants had to press a key when 30 more seconds had elapsed (visual complexity production task). In the H-VC condition, the four screens of the virtual room displayed ifferrent videos at the same time. In the L-VC condition, the four screens presented the same video synchronously.

News

• March, 2022: Paper and data available.
• Jan, 2022: Paper accepted at PLOS One.
• Feb, 2022: Web up!
• May, 2020: Poster presented at VSS (online).

Abstract

Time perception is fluid and affected by manipulations to visual inputs. Previous literature shows that changes to low-level visual properties alter time judgments at the millisecond-level. At longer intervals, in the span of seconds and minutes, high-level cognitive effects (e.g., emotions, memories) elicited by visual inputs affect time perception, but these effects are confounded with semantic information in these inputs, and are therefore challenging to measure and control. In this work, we investigate the effect of asemantic visual properties (pure visual features devoid of emotional or semantic value) on interval time perception. Our experiments were conducted with binary and production tasks in both conventional and head-mounted displays, testing the effects of four different visual features (spatial luminance contrast, temporal frequency, field of view, and visual complexity). Our results reveal a consistent pattern: larger visual changes all shorten perceived time in intervals of up to 3 minutes, remarkably contrary to their effect on millisecond-level perception. Our findings may help alter participants' time perception, which can have broad real-world implications.

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Bibtex

Related

• 2022: Multimodality in VR: A Survey

Acknowledgements

SM was supported by a DGA predoctoral grant (period 2018-2022). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through an ERC Consolidator grant (CHAMELEON project, grant agreement No 682080, DG) and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN/ETN grant (DyViTo project, grant agreement No 765121, DG), as well as the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project PID2019-105004GB-I00, BM), National Science Foundation Awards #1839974 (GW) and #1553333 (GW), and a generous gift by Adobe (SM).