Seeing nothing happening: Moments of absence as perceptual events

Event representations canonically arise when something is doing something, such as a ball bouncing or a clock chiming. But does perception represent eventhood even when nothing is happening, as in a break in the rain or a moment of silence? Here, by leveraging the fact that event representations distort experienced duration, we demonstrate that perception constructs positive and differentiated representations of absence. Experiment 1 exploited the recent discovery that a single continuous event is perceived as longer than two discrete events having the same objective duration (the “one-is-more illusion”; Yousif & Scholl, 2019). Instead of events with actual objects, our observers viewed periods of absence, during which an eye-catching object (e.g., a drifting UFO) briefly vanished, before reappearing. Remarkably, observers judged a single continuous absence as longer than two discrete absences separated by a brief reappearance — demonstrating that this illusion occurs with absences as well as presences. Experiment 2 generalized this finding to audition. Observers were immersed in ambient noise (e.g., a busy restaurant) and occasionally heard periods of silence. Again, one continuous silence was heard as longer than two equivalent silences. Finally, we asked: Do experiences of absence have a common, purely negative character, or can they be positively represented as *different* from one another? Experiment 3 explored this question by adapting the “oddball illusion”, where a stimulus that breaks a sequence (e.g., a looming circle after several non-looming circles) is seen as longer (Tse et al., 2004). In our study, observers viewed several “standard absences”, wherein one of two circles disappeared for a fixed duration, followed by an “oddball absence”, wherein the other circle disappeared for a variable duration. Observers judged oddball absences as longer than standards, suggesting that oddball absences were perceived differently from standard absences. Thus, moments of absence elicit differentiated, perceptual event representations.