Shortening of subjective tone intervals followed by repetitive tone stimuli

Accumulated evidence shows that a subjective time interval is lengthened by preceding or concurrent presentation of flickers or repetitive tone stimuli that have been hypothesized to increase the frequency of pulse generation by a brain pacemaker. In the present study, we presented a series of repetitive tone stimuli after an interval that started and ended with tone markers. We found that subjective perception of the preceding interval was not lengthened but shortened by the tone stimuli that followed the interval. The perceived duration decreased as the frequency of the repetitive tone stimuli increased. The effect disappeared when the repetitive tone stimuli were delivered with a delay of 500 msec after the test interval or when continuous sound was delivered instead of delivering a rapid series of tones. On the basis of the results, we propose that the pulse count accumulated during a test interval was normalized by the clock frequency just after the test interval in a postdictive manner.