Visual feature processing in the early visual cortex affects duration perception.

Event timing engages a distributed neural network including cortical and subcortical structures. However, it remains unclear whether the early visual cortex contributes to event timing. Here we showed that the processes of nontemporal visual features such as orientation and spatial location, which are coded by the early visual cortex, contribute to the temporal representation of a visual stimulus. Participants were presented with 2 successive Gabor patches (a prime and a target) with different orientations or spatial locations. The subjective duration of the target was significantly reduced when it was preceded by the prime compared with when presented alone. More important, this duration-compression effect varied systematically as a function of orientation similarity or spatial proximity between the prime and the target and was influenced by how the prime and the target were perceptually grouped. Our results suggest that repetition suppression of neural activity in response to orientation may contribute to the observed duration distortion and that neurons in the early visual cortex with small receptive fields and orientation selectivity may be involved in visual temporal perception. Our findings help to understand the functional role of early visual cortex in event timing in humans.