Remote temporal camouflage J Cass1, E Van der Burg2 |
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1Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Australia |
| Humans are capable of differentiating and sequencing events at multiple temporal scales. At the coarsest scales (seconds-minutes) temporal judgments rely on episodic memory systems. At finer temporal scales we gain direct perceptual access to the timing of stimulus events. Here we show that our precision for making visual simultaneity and temporal order judgments can be severely corrupted by more than a factor of four due to the mere presence of abrupt visual events located elsewhere in the visual field. This effect we refer to as Remote Temporal Camouflage (RTC) occurs even when target elements are separated from distractor events by large spatial and temporal distances. These interference effects have a unique spatial distribution conforming to neither the predictions of attentional capture by transient events, nor by stimulus dependencies associated with other contextual phenomena such as crowding, object-substitution masking or motion-induced blindness. These dependencies combined with the absence of RTC under cross-modal (audio-visual) target conditions suggest it is likely to result from interactions between and/or compulsory integration within long-range visual motion mechanisms. |
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