Short-term global motion adaptation induces a compression in the subjective duration of dynamic visual events

Apparent duration can be manipulated in a local region of visual field by long-term adaptation to motion or flicker (Johnston, Arnold, & Nishida, 2006). These effects show narrow spatial tuning (Ayhan, Bruno, Nishida, & Johnston, 2009), as well as retinotopic position dependency (Bruno, Ayhan, & Johnston, 2010), supporting early locus in the visual pathway. Here, we introduce a new effect using RDK as a short-term visual adaptor and demonstrate that a brief, subsecond range adaptation induces a significant subjective duration compression (∼10%) on a subsequently presented test stimulus (RDK pattern) only for global motion patterns drifting at 50% motion coherence but not for those drifting at 0% coherence, suggesting a higher level area as a source of origin. In another set of experiments using a plaid stimulus as the adaptor and gratings as the tests, we report again a significant duration compression following a brief motion adaptation, although the effect does not seem to be consistently selective for a particular direction of the standard test relative to that of the plaid adaptor (two-dimensional motion) or its components (one-dimensional motion). Finally, we conduct an experiment using shutter glasses and find that the effects of a short-term adaptor presented monocularly to one eye transfer to the nonadapted eye, providing evidence for the interocular transfer. In a series of control experiments, we also show that the duration effects cannot be explained by adaptation-induced changes in perceived speed, perceived onset-and-offset, and attentional resource allocation. Overall, the duration compression effect requiring motion coherence in RDK, persisting in plaid stimulus, and showing interocular transfer imply explicit genuine mechanisms mediating duration effects in the higher level motion areas.