The brain is able to extract associative regularities between stimuli and readjust the perceived timing of correlated sensory signals. In order to elucidate whether these two mechanisms interact with each other or not, we exposed participants to two different visual stimuli (a circle and a triangle) that appeared continuously and unpredictably, for 5 min. While the circle always preceded the tone for 700 ms, the triangle did not. Yet, the triangle could appear, by chance, before and after the tone, and between the circle and the tone. In two different test blocks, conducted before and after the 5-min exposure phase, participants performed simultaneity judgments regarding one of the visual stimuli (the circle or the triangle) and the exposed tone presented at different stimulus onset asynchronies. The results revealed that the precision at judging the temporal relation between the ‘associated figure’ (the circle) and the tone increased significantly after the 5-min exposure. This effect was not observed for the non-associated figure (the triangle) and occurred even when participants reported to be unaware of any association between the stimuli presented. This pattern of results indicates that the perceptual association between sensory signals can influence their subjective temporal processing.

大脑能够提取出刺激之间的关联规律性，并重新调整相关感觉信号的感知时机。为了阐明这两种机制是否相互影响，我们将参与者暴露于两个不同的视觉刺激（一个圆形和一个三角形），持续5分钟且无法预测地出现。虽然圆圈始终先于音调持续700毫秒，但三角形却没有。但是，三角形可能会偶然出现在音调之前和之后以及圆和音调之间。在5分钟暴露阶段之前和之后进行的两个不同测试块中，参与者对视觉刺激（圆形或三角形）之一和在不同刺激发作异步时呈现的暴露音调进行了同时判断。结果表明，在5分钟的曝光后，判断“相关图形”（圆圈）和色调之间的时间关系的精度显着提高。对于未关联的图形（三角形），未观察到此效果，即使参与者报告不知道所呈现的刺激之间有任何关联，也会发生这种效果。这种结果模式表明，感觉信号之间的知觉关联可以影响其主观时间处理。