Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science.
Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Jun;30(6):907-916. doi: 10.1177/0956797619842198. Epub 2019 Apr 16.
Retinal input is frequently lost because of eye blinks, yet humans rarely notice these gaps in visual input. Although previous studies focused on the perceptual and neural correlates of diminished awareness to blinks, the impact of these correlates on the perceived time of concurrent events is unknown. Here, we investigated whether the subjective sense of time is altered by spontaneous blinks. We found that participants ( = 22) significantly underestimated the duration of a visual stimulus when a spontaneous blink occurred during stimulus presentation and that this underestimation was correlated with the blink duration of individual participants. Importantly, the effect was not present when durations of an auditory stimulus were judged ( = 23). The results point to a link between spontaneous blinks, previously demonstrated to induce activity suppression in the visual cortex, and a compression of subjective time. They suggest that ongoing encoding within modality-specific sensory cortices, independent of conscious awareness, informs the subjective sense of time.
由于眨眼，视网膜输入经常丢失，但人类很少注意到视觉输入中的这些间隙。尽管之前的研究集中在对眨眼的感知和神经相关性上，但这些相关性对同时发生的事件的感知时间的影响尚不清楚。在这里，我们研究了自发眨眼是否会改变主观时间感。我们发现，当视觉刺激呈现时发生自发眨眼时，参与者（n=22）会明显低估视觉刺激的持续时间，并且这种低估与个体参与者的眨眼持续时间相关。重要的是，当判断听觉刺激的持续时间时（n=23），则没有这种效果。结果表明，自发眨眼与先前证明的在视觉皮层中诱导活动抑制之间存在联系，并且主观时间被压缩。它们表明，特定于模态的感觉皮层中的持续编码，独立于意识意识，会影响主观时间感。
