What's next?: Time is subjectively dilated not only for 'oddball' events, but also for events immediately after oddballs.

Our experience of time is strikingly plastic: Depending on contextual factors, the same objective duration can seem to fly by or drag on. Perhaps the most direct demonstration of such subjective time dilation is the oddball effect: when seeing identical objects appear one after another, followed by an "oddball" (e.g., a disc that suddenly grows in size, in a sequence of otherwise static discs), observers experience this oddball as having lasted longer than its nonoddball counterparts. Despite extensive work on this phenomenon, a surprisingly foundational question remains unasked: What actually gets dilated? Beyond the oddball, are the objects just before (or just after) the oddball also dilated? As in previous studies, observers viewed sequences of colored discs, one of which could be the oddball-and subsequently reproduced the oddball's duration. Unlike previous studies, however, there were also critical trials in which observers instead reproduced the duration of the disc immediately before or after the oddball. A clear pattern emerged: oddball-induced time dilation extended to the post-oddball disc, but not the pre-oddball disc. Whence this temporal asymmetry? We suggest that an oddball's sudden appearance may induce uncertainty about what will happen next, heightening attention until after the uncertainty is resolved.

Seeing Soft Materials Draped Over Objects: A Case Study of Intuitive Physics in Perception, Attention, and Memory.

We typically think of intuitive physics in terms of high-level cognition, but might aspects of physics also be extracted during lower-level visual processing? Might we not only think about physics, but also see it? We explored this using multiple tasks in online adult samples with objects covered by soft materials-as when you see a chair with a blanket draped over it-where you must account for the physical interactions between cloth, gravity, and object. In multiple change-detection experiments (n = 200), observers from an online testing marketplace were better at detecting image changes involving underlying object structure versus those involving only the superficial folds of cloths-even when the latter were more extreme along several dimensions. And in probe-comparison experiments (n = 100), performance was worse when both probes (vs. only one) appeared on image regions reflective of underlying object structure (equating visual properties). This work collectively shows how vision uses intuitive physics to recover the deeper underlying structure of scenes.