Table 1.
Psychophysical manipulations that lead to duration distortions and corresponding physiology where available.
| stimulus property | psychophysics | reference | neural signature | reference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| brightness | brighter objects appear to last longer | Fraisse (1963), Brigner (1986), Xuan et al. (2007) and Terao et al. (2008) | firing rates increase monotonically with increasing object luminance | lateral geniculate nucleus, Tikhomirov (1983) and Maunsell et al. (1999); primary visual cortex, Barlow et al. (1978) |
| size | bigger objects appear to last longer | Ono & Kawahara (2007) and Xuan et al. (2007) | bigger objects activate larger areas of retinotopic cortex | Murray et al. (2006) |
| numerosity | objects with larger numerosity appear to last longer | Xuan et al. (2007) | larger numbers trigger higher firing rates in lateral intraparietal area of monkeys | Roitman et al. (2007) |
| motion | moving objects appear to last longer than stationary objects | Brown (1931) | many areas in the human brain respond to visual motion when compared with stationary objects | Dupont et al. (1994) |
| novelty | oddball stimuli appear to last longer | Tse et al. (2004) and Pariyadath & Eagleman (2007) | novel stimuli trigger increases in fMRI and EEG signals in many brain regions | Linden et al. (1999) and Ranganath & Rainer (2003) |
| temporal frequency of a flickering stimulus | objects with faster flicker appear to last longer, up to 8 Hz | Kanai et al. (2006) | striate cortex increases activation with increasing flicker rate of up to 8 Hz | Kaufmann et al. (2000) |
| looming | looming stimuli appear to last longer in duration than stationary or receding stimuli | Tse et al. (2004) and van Wassenhove et al. (2008) | parietal areas show more activity in response to inward moving radial dots than outward moving ones | de Jong et al. (1994) |
| filled interval | filled intervals seem longer than empty intervals | Thomas & Brown (1974) and Ihle & Wilsoncroft (1983) | ||
| pattern complexity | more complex patterns of lights appear to last longer than simpler patterns | Roelofs & Zeeman (1951) and Schiffman & Bobko (1974) note that these experiments were performed at more than 1 s time scale; to our knowledge they have not been tested at less than 1 s | ||
| number of events | the more events that happen in a window of time, the longer the window is retrospectively judged to have lasted | Fraisse (1963), Poynter (1989) and Brown (1995) note that these papers used more than 1 s time scales |