Stimulus presentation is temporally accurate if the stimulus appears at the point in time and for the duration specified by the experimental design.

More specifically, brief stimulus presentation with these apparatuses for the first time fulfilled the quality criteria of temporal accuracy and precision, which are important prerequisites of visual experiments. These studies built upon the development of new apparatuses for presenting visual stimuli briefly and in a highly controlled fashion (for reviews, see Bauer, 2015 Benschop, 1998). This requirement is most clearly illustrated by studies dating back to the beginnings of experimental psychology in the 19th century (Cattell, 1885, 1886). Studying vision and visual cognition therefore requires precise control over the timing of visual stimulus presentation. Vision is an intricate pattern of information processing over time. Therefore, this new presentation method may be a valuable tool for experimental psychologists and neuroscientists studying vision and its temporal characteristics. Taken together, the present study shows that the G-Sync-based presentation method enables researchers to investigate visual processes whose data patterns were concealed by the low temporal resolution of previous technologies. Specifically, observers’ object recognition performance improved over fine-grained increases of object presentation duration in a theoretically predicted way. Moreover, a psychophysical experiment revealed that the ultrahigh temporal resolution impacts on human visual performance. For all implementations, we confirmed the ultrahigh temporal resolution of visual presentation with external measurements by using a photodiode. We provide software implementations in the three programming languages C++, Python (using PsychoPy2), and Matlab (using Psychtoolbox3). The method capitalizes on the G-Sync technology, which allows for presenting stimuli as soon as they have been rendered by the computer’s graphics card, without having to wait for the next screen refresh. We present a novel method for presenting visual stimuli with ultrahigh temporal resolution (<1 ms) on newly available gaming monitors. This limitation stems from the fact that the presentation of rendered stimuli has to wait until the next refresh of the computer screen. Although standard computer display technologies offer great accuracy and precision of visual presentation, their temporal resolution is limited. Studying vision and visual cognition therefore requires precise manipulations of the timing of visual stimulus presentation. Vision unfolds as an intricate pattern of information processing over time.

Observer game white screen