Christina Derichs’s research while affiliated with Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and other places

How we estimate the passage of time is an unsolved mystery in neuroscience. Illusions of subjective time provide an experimental access to this question. Here we show that time compression and expansion of visually marked intervals result from a binding of temporal interval markers. Interval markers whose onset signals were artificially weakened by briefly flashing a whole-field mask were bound in time towards markers with a strong onset signal. We explain temporal compression as the consequence of summing response distributions of weak and strong onset signals. Crucially, temporal binding occurred irrespective of the temporal order of weak and strong onset markers, thus ruling out processing latencies as an explanation for changes in interval duration judgments. If both interval markers were presented together with a mask or the mask was shown in the temporal interval center, no compression occurred. In a sequence of two intervals, masking the middle marker led to time compression for the first and time expansion for the second interval. All these results are consistent with a model view of temporal binding that serves a functional role by reducing uncertainty in the final estimate of interval duration.

Multisensory integration provides continuous and stable perception from separate sensory inputs. Here, we investigated the functional role of temporal binding between the visual and the tactile senses. To this end we used the paradigm of compression that induces shifts in time when probe stimuli are degraded, e.g., by a visual mask (Zimmermann et al. 2014). Subjects had to estimate the duration of temporal intervals of 500 ms defined by a tactile and a visual, masked stimulus. We observed a strong (~100 ms) underestimation of the temporal interval when the stimuli from both senses appeared to occur at the same position in space. In contrast, when the positions of the visual and tactile stimuli were spatially separate, interval perception was almost veridical. Temporal compression furthermore depended on the correspondence of probe features and was absent when the orientation of the tactile and visual probes was incongruent. An additional experiment revealed that temporal compression also occurs when objects were presented outside the attentional focus. In conclusion, these data support a role for spatiotemporal binding in temporal compression, which is at least in part selective for object features.