The effects of orientation-specific adaptation on the duration of short-term visual storage

The hypothesis that the perceived duration of a briefly presented stimulus could be modified as a result of adapting subjects to square-wave gratings of a particular orientation was tested in two experiments. Perceived durations to horizontal and vertical gratings were estimated by having subjects judge when the intermittent stimuli were experienced as continuously present. In experiment 1, it was found that the apparent duration of a grating decreased following adaptation to a grating of the same orientation, and increased after adaptation to gratings perpendicular in orientation to the test stimulus. The interocular transfer of the effect was demonstrated in experiment 2. These results suggest that the outputs of cortical orientation-sensitive populations of neural units are involved in duration judgments and the features available in short-term visual storage are based on these cortical populations.