Abstract
Why are nearly simultaneous stimuli frequently perceived in reversed order? The origin of errors in temporal judgments is a question older than experimental psychology itself. One of the earliest suspects is attention. According to the concept of prior entry, attention accelerates attended stimuli; thus they have “prior entry” to perceptive processing stages, including consciousness. Although latency advantages for attended stimuli have been revealed in psychophysical studies many times, these measures (e.g. temporal order judgments, simultaneity judgments) cannot test the prior-entry hypothesis completely. Since they assess latency differences between an attended and an unattended stimulus, they cannot distinguish between faster processing of attended stimuli and slower processing of unattended stimuli. Therefore, we present a novel paradigm providing separate estimates for processing advantages respectively disadvantages of attended and unattended stimuli. We found that deceleration of unattended stimuli contributes more strongly to the prior-entry illusion than acceleration of attended stimuli. Thus, in the temporal domain, attention fulfills its selective function primarily by deceleration of unattended stimuli. That means it is actually posterior entry, not prior entry which accounts for the largest part of the effect.
Highlights
Processing of temporal information is crucial to human life
3.1 Temporal Order Judgments temporal order judgments (TOJ) were analyzed first because an analysis of clock times would be obsolete without a replication of the standard prior-entry effect in the present experimental paradigm
Two parameters were derived from each psychometric function, the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) and the difference limen (DL), as measure of discrimination accuracy
Summary
Processing of temporal information is crucial to human life. It is involved in a wide range of experiences and behaviors (cf. [1]), for instance in biological rhythms, speech, and control of motor behavior. Two physically simultaneous stimuli are often perceived as successive [8,9,10,11] and the order of two rapidly succeeding stimuli is frequently reversed (e.g., [9,12,13,14,15,16]). The source of these and other temporal errors aroused interest even before the beginning of experimental psychology itself [9,17,18,19] and was for the first time systematically investigated in the field of astronomy
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