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Spatiotemporal distortions of visual perception at the time of saccades,J Neurosci, 42 (29), 13147-13157.

Spatiotemporal distortions of visual perception at the time of saccades,J Neurosci, 42 (29), 13147-13157. 

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Both space and time are grossly distorted during saccades. Here we show that the two distortions are strongly linked, and that both could be a consequence of the transient remapping mechanisms that affect visual neurons perisaccadically. We measured perisaccadic spatial and temporal distortions simultaneously by asking subjects to report both the perceived spatial location of a perisaccadic vertical bar (relative to a remembered ruler), and its perceived timing (relative to two sounds straddling the bar). During fixation and well before or after saccades, bars were localized veridically in space and in time. In different epochs of the perisaccadic interval, temporal perception was subject to different biases. At about the time of the saccadic onset, bars were temporally mislocalized 50-100 ms later than their actual presentation and spatially mislocalized toward the saccadic target. Importantly, the magnitude of the temporal distortions co-varied with the spatial localization bias and the two phenomena had similar dynamics. Within a brief period about 50 ms before saccadic onset, stimuli were perceived with shorter latencies than at other delays relative to saccadic onset, suggesting that the perceived passage of time transiently inverted its direction. Based on this result we could predict the inversion of perceived temporal order for two briefly flashed visual stimuli. We developed a model that simulates the perisaccadic transient change of neuronal receptive fields predicting well the reported temporal distortions. The key aspects of the model are the dynamics of the “remapped” activity and the use of decoder operators that are optimal during fixation, but are not updated perisaccadically.

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Shifts in spatial attention affect the perceived duration of events,J Vis, 1 (9), 9 1-13.

Shifts in spatial attention affect the perceived duration of events,J Vis, 1 (9), 9 1-13.

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We investigated the relationship between attention and perceived duration of visual events with a double-task paradigm. The primary task was to discriminate the size change of a 2 degree circle presented 10 degrees left, right, above, or below fixation; the secondary task was to judge the temporal separation (from 133 ms to 633 ms) of two equiluminant horizontal bars (10 deg x 2 deg) briefly flashed 12 degrees above or below fixation. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between primary and secondary task ranged from -1300 ms to +1000 ms. Temporal intervals in proximity of the onset of the primary task stimuli were perceived strongly compressed by up to 40%. The effect was proportional to the size of the interval with a maximum effect at 100 ms SOA. Control experiments show that neither primary-task difficulty, nor the type of primary task discrimination (form or motion, or equiluminant or luminance contrast) nor spatial congruence between primary and secondary task alter the effect. Interestingly, the compression occurred only when the intervals are marked by bars presented in separated spatial locations: when the interval is marked by two bars flashed in the same spatial position no temporal distortion was found. These data indicate that attention can alter perceived duration when the brain has to compare the passage of time at two different spatial positions, corroborating earlier findings that mechanisms of time perception may monitor separately the various spatial locations possibly at high level of analysis.

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Temporal mechanisms of multimodal binding,Proc Biol Sci, 1663 (276), 1761-1769.

Temporal mechanisms of multimodal binding,Proc Biol Sci, 1663 (276), 1761-1769.

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The simultaneity of signals from different senses-such as vision and audition-is a useful cue for determining whether those signals arose from one environmental source or from more than one. To understand better the sensory mechanisms for assessing simultaneity, we measured the discrimination thresholds for time intervals marked by auditory, visual or auditory-visual stimuli, as a function of the base interval. For all conditions, both unimodal and cross-modal, the thresholds followed a characteristic ‘dipper function’ in which the lowest thresholds occurred when discriminating against a non-zero interval. The base interval yielding the lowest threshold was roughly equal to the threshold for discriminating asynchronous from synchronous presentations. Those lowest thresholds occurred at approximately 5, 15 and 75 ms for auditory, visual and auditory-visual stimuli, respectively. Thus, the mechanisms mediating performance with cross-modal stimuli are considerably slower than the mechanisms mediating performance within a particular sense. We developed a simple model with temporal filters of different time constants and showed that the model produces discrimination functions similar to the ones we observed in humans. Both for processing within a single sense, and for processing across senses, temporal perception is affected by the properties of temporal filters, the outputs of which are used to estimate time offsets, correlations between signals, and more.