Abstract
Predicting the time of stimulus onset is a key component in perception. Previous investigations of perceived timing have focused on the effect of stimulus properties such as rhythm and temporal irregularity, but the influence of non-temporal properties and their role in predicting stimulus timing has not been exhaustively considered. The present study aims to understand how a non-temporal pattern in a sequence of regularly timed stimuli could improve or bias the detection of temporal deviations. We presented interspersed sequences of 3, 4, 5, and 6 auditory tones where only the timing of the last stimulus could slightly deviate from isochrony. Participants reported whether the last tone was ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ relative to the expected regular timing. In two conditions, the tones composing the sequence were either organized into musical scales or they were random tones. In one experiment, all sequences ended with the same tone; in the other experiment, each sequence ended with a different tone. Results indicate higher discriminability of anisochrony with musical scales and with longer sequences, irrespective of the knowledge of the final tone. Such an outcome suggests that the predictability of non-temporal properties, as enabled by the musical scale pattern, can be a factor in determining the sensitivity of time judgments.
Highlights
Perceived timing does not necessarily represent the objective time (e.g., Woodrow, 1935; Allan, 1979), as perception can be influenced by stimulus repetitions, sequence patterns, and expectations (e.g., Jones, 1976; Hirsh et al, 1990; Rose and Summers, 1995)
The simplest form of temporal pattern, the repeated presentation of identical stimuli separated by identical intervals, has been shown to lead to increased temporal sensitivity in detecting anisochrony, and such an increase has been quantitatively captured by several models (Schulze, 1978; Drake and Botte, 1993; Ivry and Hazeltine, 1995; Miller and McAuley, 2005; ten Hoopen et al, 2011; Li et al, 2016)
Similar perceptual influences of patterns on the precision of discrimination performance occur when the pattern is more complex (Barnes and Jones, 2000; McAuley and Jones, 2003). Such improvements in temporal sensitivity have been interpreted in several ways, including an averaging process for the perceptual representation of interval durations (Schulze, 1978), the effect of sensory predictions generated by expectations and conditional probability of future event (Nobre et al, 2007), or the influence of neuronal oscillation-based predictive timing (Arnal and Giraud, 2012) which relates to the idea that rhythmic sequences entrain low-frequency neural oscillations enhancing sensory processing of in-phase stimuli (e.g., Jones, 1976; Lakatos et al, 2008; Ng et al, 2012; Cravo et al, 2013; Horr et al, 2016)
Summary
Perceived timing does not necessarily represent the objective time (e.g., Woodrow, 1935; Allan, 1979), as perception can be influenced by stimulus repetitions, sequence patterns, and expectations (e.g., Jones, 1976; Hirsh et al, 1990; Rose and Summers, 1995). Similar perceptual influences of patterns on the precision of discrimination performance occur when the pattern is more complex (Barnes and Jones, 2000; McAuley and Jones, 2003) Such improvements in temporal sensitivity have been interpreted in several ways, including an averaging process for the perceptual representation of interval durations (Schulze, 1978), the effect of sensory predictions generated by expectations and conditional probability of future event (Nobre et al, 2007), or the influence of neuronal oscillation-based predictive timing (Arnal and Giraud, 2012) which relates to the idea that rhythmic sequences entrain low-frequency neural oscillations enhancing sensory processing of in-phase stimuli (e.g., Jones, 1976; Lakatos et al, 2008; Ng et al, 2012; Cravo et al, 2013; Horr et al, 2016). We will analyze whether some of these accounts based on the presence of temporal patterns, hold for sequences with non-temporal patterns
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