Perceived timing of new objects and feature changes

Recent psychophysical studies have shown that perceived timings of events can be dissociated from their physical temporal relationship. In the flash-lag effect (FLE), a flash presented at the same spatiotemporal position as a continuously moving stimulus is perceived to lag behind the moving stimulus. In the present study, we report a peculiar condition in which FLE does not occur even when the position of a moving object is estimated at the moment of a transient event. In a series of experiments, we compared perceived timings and processing delays for appearance of a new object against feature changes of an existing object. We found that perceived timing of the appearance of a new object is delayed compared to the perception of feature changes updating the properties of an object. Our results suggest the construction of a new object representation requires additional time to establish a stable neuronal representation.