Visual-tactile perception of time
Lucilla Cardinali, Alessandro Farnè, Claudio Brozzoli, Romeo Salemme, Francesca Frassinetti
Poster
Last modified: 2008-05-13
Abstract
Time perception is fundamental for adaptive interaction in the environment. Although our experience of the world is basically multisensory, previous studies concentrated most on time perception either within vision or audition. Here we asked: 1) how precise is the processing of temporal durations in the tactile modality, as compared to the visual modality; 2) whether time perception is characterized by crossmodal visuo-tactile interaction, a visual (tactile) stimulus influencing time duration of a tactile (visual) stimulus. We asked healthy subjects to perform a time bisection task both with Visual and Tactile stimuli. After subjects learned to discriminate between long and short sample durations, they judged the duration of 5 intermediate different targets within a 2-forced-choice paradigm (short or long). Subjects performed the same bisection task both in unimodal (visual or tactile) stimulation conditions, and in bimodal conditions. Moreover, bimodal conditions could be congruent (same duration for each modality) or incongruent combinations (different durations across modalities). Results showed that tactile temporal processing is highly precise, being comparable to visual processing of time. Moreover, temporal processing in bimodal conditions is less precise when incongruent durations are presented as compared to congruent ones. These findings suggest a crossmodal visuo-tactile interaction in time perception.