Presentation Information
[P3-06]Entrainment in Low- and High-Level Ventral Visual Regions Does Not Affect Temporal Overestimations
*Amirmahmoud Houshmand Chatroudi1,2, Yuko Yotsumoto1 (1. The University of Tokyo (Japan), 2. Sony Computer Sciences Laboratories (Japan))
Keywords:
Neural Entrainment,vision,time dilation,flicker
Temporal illusions are intriguing yet informative glitches in our otherwise precisely functioning perception of time. One instance of such temporal illusions is our consistent tendency to overestimate flickering intervals (Kanai et al., 2006), a phenomenon known as flicker-induced time dilation (FITD). A decade of research has boiled down to two major hypotheses explaining this temporal distortion: subjective salience (Herbst et al., 2013) and neural entrainment (Hashimoto & Yotsumoto, 2018). Focusing on steady-state evoked potentials (SSVEPs)—neural responses to the regularity of flickers—evidence supporting the neural entrainment hypothesis has been inconsistent (Li et al., 2020). In this study, we employed a combination of luminance-based and semantic flickers (Koenig-Robert & VanRullen, 2013) to explore whether the cortical location of SSVEPs across the visual hierarchy could help explain the inconsistency between FITD and the entrainment hypothesis. While EEG results indicated a distinct pattern of activation in the parieto-occipital regions, the size of the temporal illusion did not vary across conditions. More importantly, the FITD magnitude in flickering conditions (luminance, semantic, and combined flickers) was comparable to the control scramble condition. This latter finding presents a fundamental challenge for time perception theories explaining temporal illusions and suggests a need to revisit the quiddity of FITD.