Adaptation to average duration

There has been a recent surge of research examining how the visual system compresses information by representing the average properties of sets of similar objects to circumvent strict capacity limitations. Efficient representation by perceptual averaging helps to maintain the balance between the needs to perceive salient events in the surrounding environment and sustain the illusion of stable and complete perception. Whereas there have been many demonstrations that the visual system encodes spatial average properties, such as average orientation, average size, and average numerosity along single dimensions, there has been no investigation of whether the fundamental nature of average representations extends to the temporal domain. Here, we used an adaptation paradigm to demonstrate that the average duration of a set of sequentially presented stimuli negatively biases the perceived duration of subsequently presented information. This negative adaptation aftereffect is indicative of a fundamental visual property, providing the first evidence that average duration is encoded along a single visual dimension. Our results not only have important implications for how the visual system efficiently encodes redundant information to evaluate salient events as they unfold within the dynamic context of the surrounding environment, but also contribute to the long-standing debate regarding the neural underpinnings of temporal encoding.