Vibrations Feel Longer Than Their Visual Analogues in Virtual Reality

Temporal judgments vary across sensory modalities due to differences in information processing. Auditory intervals, for instance, are typically judged to be longer than visual intervals of the same duration. However, comparisons between tactile and visual duration judgments are scarce, particularly in VR where unique characteristics of the environment can affect the temporal judgements. Here, we compared visual and tactile duration judgments in a virtual reality (VR) environment. Participants performed a cross-modal comparison task, judging whether tactile stimuli delivered to their hands were longer than visual stimuli presented on their matched hand representations in VR. We found that tactile stimuli were consistently judged to be longer than visual stimuli of the same duration. Furthermore, the behavioral data conformed well to a model from the Scalar Expectancy Theory (SET) of timing - with higher variability in visual as compared to tactile judgments. Our findings suggest that duration judgements in VR may depend on factors such as saliency contrast and unique conditions of VR. These results can also help in the design of VR applications.