Saccades cause compression of time perception in the tunnel effect C Chotsrisuparat, A Koning, R van Lier |
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Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
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| Time length or duration is an important dimension of our perceived experiences. Here, we investigated the influence of the tunnel effect on time perception. The tunnel effect deals with the perception of a moving object that disappears behind an occluder and then reappears on the other side of the occluder. We asked participants to estimate the duration of such an event, and found that the occlusion condition (i.e., the tunnel effect) was judged shorter than a control condition with the same movement but without occlusion. We suggest that this is due to anticipatory eye movements participants made in the occluder condition to the side of the occluder where the object was expected to reappear, which decreased perceived duration. To investigate this further, in a follow-up experiment, participants were instructed to either track the object’s trajectory behind an occluder or make a saccade directly to the other side of an occluder. An eye-tracker was used to verify that the instructions were followed. The results confirmed our hypothesis that in the tunnel effect, anticipatory saccades lead to shorter perceived durations. |
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