Abstract
Perception of time is susceptible to distortions; among other factors, it has been suggested that the perceived duration of a stimulus is affected by the observer’s expectations. It has been hypothesized that the duration of an oddball stimulus is overestimated because it is unexpected, whereas repeated stimuli have a shorter perceived duration because they are expected. However, recent findings suggest instead that fulfilled expectations about a stimulus elicit an increase in perceived duration, and that the oddball effect occurs because the oddball is a target stimulus, not because it is unexpected. Therefore, it has been suggested that top-down attention is sometimes sufficient to explain this effect, and sometimes only necessary, with an additional contribution from saliency. However, how the expectedness of a target stimulus and its salient features affect its perceived duration is still an open question. In the present study, participants’ expectations about and the saliency of target stimuli were orthogonally manipulated with stimuli presented on a short (Experiment 1) or long (Experiment 2) temporal scale. Four repetitive standard stimuli preceded each target stimulus in a task in which participants judged whether the target was longer or shorter in duration than the standards. Engagement of top-down attention to target stimuli increased their perceived duration to the same extent irrespective of their expectedness. A small but significant additional contribution to this effect from the saliency of target stimuli was dependent on the temporal scale of stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, saliency only significantly increased perceived duration in the case of expected target stimuli. In contrast, in Experiment 2, saliency exerted a significant effect on the overestimation elicited by unexpected target stimuli, but the contribution of this variable was eliminated in the case of expected target stimuli. These findings point to top-down attention as the primary cognitive mechanism underlying the perceptual extraction and processing of task-relevant information, which may be strongly correlated with perceived duration. Furthermore, the scalar properties of timing were observed, favoring the pacemaker-accumulator model of timing as the underlying timing mechanism.
Highlights
Time perception refers to our subjective experience of both the passage of time and how much time has passed, such as the perceived duration of events (Buonomano, 2017)
The functions shown are only for illustration; individual point of subjective equality (PSE), relative duration distortion (RDD), and difference limen (DL) values entered into the following analyses were obtained from individually fitted psychometric functions
A small but significant contribution from saliency was observed with salient expected and unexpected target stimuli, but this effect was dependent on the temporal scale of stimulus presentation
Summary
Time perception refers to our subjective experience of both the passage of time and how much time has passed, such as the perceived duration of events (Buonomano, 2017). In a classical temporal oddball task, the duration of an unexpected deviant target stimulus (oddball) is overestimated if it is presented randomly within a train of repetitive stimuli with a constant standard duration (Tse et al, 2004; Pariyadath and Eagleman, 2007, 2012; Schindel et al, 2011; Birngruber et al, 2014). The OE can be elicited using variations on the classical temporal oddball task, such as presenting the target stimulus in a fixed position in the sequence of standards (e.g., van Wassenhove et al, 2008; Herai and Mogi, 2010; Cai et al, 2015), or even using a comparison task, in which only one standard stimulus precedes the target stimuli (e.g., Ulrich et al, 2006; Matthews, 2011; Matthews’, 2015; Skylark and Gheorghiu, 2017)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
