Effect of spontaneous eye blinks on time perception using a dynamic stimulus

• Main Author: Kerk, Vanessa Per-Lyn
• Other Authors: Gerrit Maus
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/141777
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Blinks prevent the eyes’ surface from drying out but seem to occur more often than necessary. Time processing models have been divided between dedicated and intrinsic models as it is uncertain whether we have a central internal clock which functions like a pacemaker or an intrinsic model that is modality or task-specific. As spontaneous blinks mostly go unnoticed, it could provide us insight into how subjective time perception can be influenced by a continuous percept. In this study, participants (n = 20) were placed in a dark room whilst viewing a Gabor that rotated either clockwise or counter-clockwise and disappeared after a blink or randomly (i.e., blank introduced as an artificial gap analogous to a blink). Response errors were calculated as the difference between the last angle of the Gabor and participants’ responses. It was hypothesized that blinks would result in a subjective underestimation of the Gabor’s last position whilst blanks would lead to an overestimation. A clear effect of direction (i.e., positive response bias) on response error was found - that is, a perceived overshoot of the final position, regardless of blink or blank conditions. This provides further evidence for the representational momentum effect and was also notably found across blinks. Surprisingly, there was no effect of blinks on response error. As the complexity of the experimental design was limited, velocity of the Gabor rotation was not manipulated. Future studies should consider the effect of velocity on response error and whether there is a ‘slowing of momentum’ over time.