Do "auditory" and "visual" time really feel the same? Effects of stimulus modality on duration and passage-of-time judgements.

Abstract

The present study investigated the previous claim that auditory stimuli appear to last longer than visual ones, but that the modality has no influence on the experience of the passage of time (POT). Participants judged the duration, the POT, and the phenomenal quality of the two temporal experiences after hearing a tone or viewing a blue square with a duration between 200 ms and 5 s. The results showed modality effects on both duration and POT judgements, with longer duration and slower POT judgements for auditory than for visual stimuli. Judgements of phenomenal quality showed large interindividual differences, with most participants showing positive but some also negative relationships with target duration for both qualities. Importantly, duration and POT judgements were largely unaffected by these interindividual differences. The present results clearly contradict the previous assumption that the experienced POT is not influenced by sensory modality.