Utilising remote temporal camouflage to investigate unimodal visual rapid temporal recalibration

Abstract

Accurate and precise temporal perception is fundamental to numerous everyday tasks. However, existing research demonstrates that humans exhibit a high degree of uncertainty regarding the temporal properties of stimuli, particularly in visual domains. Recently, Van der Burg, Alais, and Cass (2013) found evidence for audio-visual rapid temporal recalibration: an individual's perceived temporal relationship between audio and visual stimuli is altered by exposure to an immediately prior physical audio-visual asynchrony. Subsequent studies have failed to find evidence for rapid temporal recalibration in the purely visual domain. This thesis argues that this could be because temporal recalibration is contingent upon a critical level of imprecision in temporal judgements and that these latter studies operate at near-ceiling levels of temporal precision performance. This idea is examined empirically by systematically manipulating the precision with which 21 participants can perform purely visual simultaneity judgments by surrounding visual targets with flickering task-irrelevant visual distractors, a manipulation known to profoundly impair temporal precision performance. It is predicted that conditions involving contextual non-target flicker will produce significantly greater temporal recalibration than conditions without contextual flicker. Results indicated that contextual flicker significantly impaired temporal precision (by a factor of two)-signifying temporal performance below ceiling levels. However, there was no overall convincing evidence for the existence of rapid temporal recalibration in this experiment's purely visual simultaneity judgement task. Accordingly, considering the current study's results and meticulous methodology, it is concluded that rapid temporal recalibration is unlikely to occur in unimodal visual settings.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English