RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Where does time go when you blink?
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 506279
DO 10.1101/506279
A1 Shany Grossman
A1 Chen Guata
A1 Slav Pesin
A1 Rafael Malach
A1 Ayelet N. Landau
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/26/506279.abstract
AB Retinal input is frequently lost due to eye blinks, yet humans rarely notice these gaps in visual input. While previous studies focused on the psychophysical and neural correlates of diminished awareness to blinks, the impact of blinks on the perceived time of concurrent events is unknown. Here, we investigated whether the subjective sense of time is altered by spontaneous eye blinks, and how this link may inform mechanisms of time perception. We found that participants significantly underestimated the duration of a visual stimulus when a blink occurred during the stimulus. Importantly, this effect was not present when durations of an auditory stimulus were judged. These results point to a link between spontaneous blinks, previously demonstrated to induce suppression of activity in early visual cortex, and a compression of subjective time. The findings suggest that ongoing encoding within modality-specific sensory cortices, independent of conscious awareness, inform the subjective sense of time.