Department of Cognition, Perception and Brain Sciences, University College London London, UK.
Front Psychol. 2010 Oct 21;1:170. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00170. eCollection 2010.
Traditionally time perception has been considered the product of a central, generic, cognitive mechanism. However, evidence is emerging for a distributive system with modality-specific sensory components (Morrone et al., 2005; Johnston et al., 2006). Here we show that fast contrast adaptation, which can be observed in the retina, induces a change in apparent duration. The perceived duration of a subsecond interval containing a 50% luminance contrast drifting pattern is compressed when it follows a high (90%) as compared to a low (10%) contrast interval. The duration effect cannot be attributed to changes in latency at onset relative to offset, can be dissociated from the effect of contrast context on apparent speed or apparent contrast per se and it occurs in a retinocentric frame of reference. The temporal compression is limited to high drift temporal frequencies (≥10 Hz) and is not observed for equiluminant chromatic stimuli. This pattern of results indicates a major role for the magnocellular pathway in the neural encoding and representation of visual time.
传统上，时间感知被认为是中央、通用认知机制的产物。然而，现在有证据表明存在一种具有模态特定感觉成分的分布式系统（Morrone 等人，2005 年；Johnston 等人，2006 年）。在这里，我们表明，在视网膜中可以观察到的快速对比适应会引起表观持续时间的变化。当包含 50%亮度对比度漂移模式的亚秒间隔紧随高（90%）对比间隔而不是低（10%）对比间隔时，该间隔的感知持续时间会被压缩。持续时间效应不能归因于相对于结束的潜伏期的变化，可以与对比上下文对表观速度或表观对比本身的影响分离，并且它发生在视网膜参照系中。时间压缩仅限于高漂移时间频率（≥10 Hz），并且对于等亮度的色觉刺激则不会观察到。这种结果模式表明，大细胞通路在视觉时间的神经编码和表示中起着重要作用。
