Abstract
There is evidence that timing processes in the suprasecond scale are modulated by attentional mechanisms; in addition, some studies have shown that attentional mechanisms also affect timing in the subsecond scale. Our aim was to study eye movements and pupil diameter during a temporal bisection task in the subsecond range. Subjects were trained to discriminate anchor intervals of 200 or 800 msec, and were then confronted with intermediate durations. Eye movements revealed that subjects used different cognitive strategies during the bisection timing task. When the stimulus to be timed appeared randomly at a central or 4 peripheral positions on a screen, some subjects choose to maintain their gaze toward the central area while other followed the peripheral placement of the stimulus; some others subjects used both strategies. The time of subjective equality did not differ between subjects who employed different attentional mechanisms. However, differences emerged in the timing variance and attentional indexes (time taken to initial fixation, latency to respond, pupil dilatation and duration and number of fixations to stimulus areas). Timing in the subsecond range seems invariant despite the use of different attentional strategies. Future research should determine whether the selection of attentional mechanisms is related to particular timing tasks or instructions or whether it represents idiosyncratic cognitive “styles”.
Highlights
Time estimation is an essential process that allows organisms to adapt to their environment
The subjects who had all their trials rejected maintained their gaze fixed on the central Area of Interest (AoI), while the subjects who had most of their trials accepted shifted their gaze towards the peripheral AoIs; the additional group in some trials maintained their gaze fixed on the central AoI, but in other trials shifted their gaze towards the peripheral AoIs
Some differences between subjects became apparent after using filtering criteria similar to those used in dot probe tasks [44, 45]
Summary
Time estimation is an essential process that allows organisms to adapt to their environment. One of the first models [1] to account for timing postulated a pacemaker that sends pulses to a cognitive counter that in turn sends them to a storage mechanism; thereafter, a cognitive comparator decides if the count (or distribution) in working memory is sufficiently similar to those stored previously (reference memory) to initiate a response. Additional assumptions about the distribution of pulses from the pacemaker and the observation that the ratio of the absolute interval criteria to the standard deviation of temporal estimates tends to be constant, led to the formulation of the influential model known. Other cognitive models used the pacemaker assumption, the most influential being the attentional gate model [5]. There are cognitive models that do not use a pacemaker assumption [6, 7]. A fundamental distinction between the processing of time intervals below and above 1 sec has been proposed: a more ‘‘automatic” system for timing in the millisecond range, computed by the cerebellum and striatum, and a more ‘‘cognitive” system for timing in the seconds to minutes range, computed by fronto-striatal circuits (which support working memory functions) [7,8,9]
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