title: Modulations of temporal perception by consciously and unconsciously perceived stimuli.
abstract: Temporal processing is of fundamental importance to the understanding of orders and durations of events in daily life. While recent research found that the perception of event durations is modulated by the visibility of perceived stimuli, it is still not known whether consciously and unconsciously perceived stimuli modulate temporal perception of a following stimulus in a similar vein. We investigated this using a temporal-comparison task that requires duration judgments of a standard stimulus and a probe. A prime prior to the standard stimulus reduced the subjective duration of the standard stimulus when observers were aware of the prime, and this effect changed with the temporal distance between the prime and standard. In contrast, a prime increased the subjective duration of the following standard stimulus when observers were unaware of the presence of the prime. Our findings indicate that a temporally neighbouring transient stimulus produces essentially different effects on temporal perception of following events when it is consciously and unconsciously perceived, leading to compression and expansion of subjective time, respectively.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Peking University, Yiheyuan Road 5, Beijing 100871, PR China. bzhou.x@pku.edu.cn
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Jungang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Qin
authors.forename: Lihua
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mao
authors.forename: Shihui
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Han
authors.forename: Ernst
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pöppel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult