Classic Illusions of Auditory Time Perception

Auditory Illusions

Human time perception and its illusions.

Why does a clock sometimes appear stopped? Is it possible to perceive the world in slow motion during a car accident? Can action and effect be reversed? Time perception is surprisingly prone to measurable distortions and illusions. The past few years have introduced remarkable progress in identifying and quantifying temporal illusions of duration, temporal order, and simultaneity. For example, ...

Auditory Conflicts and Illusions

Perceptual conflicts appear when the brain receives ambiguous information and needs to choose which of the conflicting pieces of information represents the actual stimulation. In some cases, one piece of information dominates the other ones and we are largely unaware of the conflicting information. In other cases, however, all pieces of information are perceptually equivalent and the brain swit...

Bodily Illusions Modulate Tactile Perception

Touch differs from other exteroceptive senses in that the body itself forms part of the tactile percept. Interactions between proprioception and touch provide a powerful way to investigate the implicit body representation underlying touch. Here, we demonstrate that an intrinsic primary quality of a tactile object, for example its size, is directly affected by the perceived size of the body part...

How emotional auditory stimuli modulate time perception.

Emotional and neutral sounds rated for valence and arousal were used to investigate the influence of emotions on timing in reproduction and verbal estimation tasks with durations from 2 s to 6 s. Results revealed an effect of emotion on temporal judgment, with emotional stimuli judged to be longer than neutral ones for a similar arousal level. Within scalar expectancy theory (J. Gibbon, R. Chur...