• Colombatto, Chen, & Scholl
• Ongchoco & Scholl
• Walter-Terrill, Ongchoco & Scholl
• Wong, Ongchoco, & Scholl
• Yates, Ongchoco & Scholl

Some of the most salient events we experience are social interactions, as in 'gaze deflection' -- wherein you quickly look away when someone 'catches' you staring at them. We discovered that perceiving such interactions is powerful enough to alter the perceived temporal order of events. Observers viewed animations of Person A turning her head in one direction to stare at Person B, and then both synchronously turning in the opposite direction. However, observers misperceived A as turning *after* B (after getting 'caught'). In this way, social perception can influence fundamental aspects of our experience, including what seems to happen when.

When staring at a regular pattern -- e.g. a piece of graph paper -- many people see more than the squares themselves; they also spontaneously see fleeting shapes and symbols (e.g. block-letters) that encompass multiple squares. This is the phenomenon of 'scaffolded attention' (where shifting patterns of attention effectively form visual objects), but not everyone experiences this type of 'visual hallucination of structure' to the same degree. Here, in an individual-differences study, we discovered that the prevalence of scaffolded attention is predicted by measures of both mental imagery and attentional breadth (but not sustained vigilance).

Visual event segmentation has profound consequences on attention and memory, but this work has rarely made contact with higher-level thought. Here we bridge this gap, asking whether subtle visual event boundaries can directly influence anchoring effects in decision-making. Subjects viewed a task-irrelevant numerical anchor (a CAPTCHA), virtually 'walked' down a hallway, then guessed the cost of a visually-depicted item (such as a suitcase). Robust anchoring effects from the CAPTCHA were eliminated when subjects passed through a virtual doorway -- demonstrating a surprisingly direct link between lower-level visual representation and higher-level thought.

In the 'oddball effect', a single object which grows in size (in a sequence of otherwise-static objects) appears to last longer. Here we explore the temporal resolution of this effect: is oddball-induced time dilation specific to the oddball itself? Observers viewed sequences of static colored discs with a single oddball, and across trials reproduced various discs' durations. We observed time dilation not only for the oddball disc itself, but also for the immediately following (but not preceding) disc. Oddballs may orient attention not only to the present moment, but also to what is about to unfold next.

We cannot perceive events without an underlying temporal medium, yet event structure can also influence time perception. Here we explore how event structure can simultaneously dilate and contract perceived time, using a novel 'rhythmic reproduction' task in which the positions of event boundaries were systematically varied. People heard musical-note sequences containing salient (but task-irrelevant) event boundaries, and reproduced the perceived rhythms. Reproductions revealed systematic, non-uniform distortions -- with inter-note latencies across boundaries dilated and those within perceived events contracted. Thus, event segmentation may facilitate a give-and-take between the subjective expansion and contraction of time.