ABSTRACT
Time is as pervasive as it is elusive to study, and how the brain keeps track of millisecond time is still unclear. Here we studied the mechanisms underlying duration perception by looking for a neural signature of subjective time distortion induced by motion adaptation. We recorded electroencephalographic signals in human participants while they were asked to discriminate the duration of visual stimuli after translational motion adaptation. Our results show that distortions of subjective time can be predicted by the amplitude of the N200 event-related potential and by the activity in the Beta band frequency spectrum. Both effects were observed from occipital electrodes contralateral to the adapted stimulus. Finally, a multivariate decoding analysis highlights the impact of motion adaptation throughout the visual stream. Overall, our findings show the crucial involvement of local and low-level perceptual processes in generating a subjective sense of time.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
In this revised version, we added a sentence to the Subjects paragraph in the Methods section explaining how the sample size of the study was chosen (page 24, lines 543-545). No other change was made to the manuscript.