Duration adaptation depends on the perceived rather than physical duration and can be observed across sensory modalities

Abstract

Previous research has indicated that exposure to sensory stimuli of short or long durations influences the perceived duration of subsequent stimuli within the same modality. However, it remains unclear whether this adaptation is driven by the stimulus physical duration or by the perceived duration. We hypothesized that the absence of cross-modal duration adaptation observed in earlier studies was due to the mismatched perceived durations of adapting stimuli. To address this issue, we conducted two experiments to explore cross-modal adaptation and its dependence on perceived duration versus physical duration. Our findings reveal that the duration aftereffect from adapting to a visual stimulus aligns more closely with the perceptually matched stimulus duration rather than the physical duration. Moreover, adapting to a subjectively matched visual stimulus produced a significant aftereffect when the test stimulus was auditory, indicating the existence of the cross-modal adaptation. Thus, duration adaptation relies on perceived duration and can occur across sensory modalities. These results suggest a distinct neural representation of perceived duration, likely located at a convergence point for multisensory information, contributes to a unified temporal experience across different sensory channels.