Does cognitive perception have access to brief temporal events?

To determine whether conscious perception has access to brief temporal event, we asked subjects in an odd-man out paradigm to determine which of the four Gaussian blobs was flickering asynchronously in time. We measure synchrony thresholds as a function of the base temporal frequency for spatially scaled stimuli in foveal and peripheral vision. The results are consistent with a time delay of around 67 milliseconds (ms) for foveal vision and 91 ms for peripheral vision. We conclude that conscious perception has access to only relatively long (∼67 ms) time events.