Insights into the perceptual moment theory: Experimental evidence from simultaneity judgment

Study and Code Description

Study Overview: This study investigates the temporal characteristics of perception, specifically testing Stroud’s perceptual moment theory, which suggests that perception occurs in discrete moments rather than continuously. Using a psychophysical paradigm, we examined asynchrony detection in human participants by presenting paired stimuli (two red LEDs) with varying stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). The results indicate that perception is temporally discretized, with the estimated duration of one perceptual moment being approximately 57.2 ms.

Methodology: Fourteen healthy volunteers (mean age 21.5 ± 3.8 years) participated in the study. A microcontroller (Arduino Uno) was programmed to randomly present 280 paired stimuli events with SOAs ranging from -65 ms to 65 ms in 5 ms increments. Participants indicated which LED (left or right) was perceived to light up first or if they could not determine the order. The data was analyzed using statistical modeling in R, revealing a continuous increase in asynchrony detection with increasing SOAs, rather than a fixed threshold.

Code Description: The provided code includes:

• R scripts for analyzing participant responses, fitting statistical models (generalized linear mixed models), and visualizing results.
• A CSV dataset in zip file containing raw participant responses from 14 subjects and 10 subjects for validation and SOA values.

Data and Code Availability: The full dataset and analysis code are available in our repository to facilitate transparency and reproducibility. Researchers can use and modify the scripts for further studies on temporal perception and psychophysics.

By making our data and code publicly available, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of perceptual processing and provide a foundation for future research in the field.

Main article is available at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02684-7