Temporal bisection in humans with longer stimulus durations.

Abstract

Normal adults were tested in eight temporal bisection conditions, using 500-Hz tones as stimuli. Stimulus lengths matched, or overlapped with, durations normally used in bisection experiments with animals, and chronometric counting was prevented by using a concurrent digit-shadowing task. Four experimental groups were used to investigate any effects of stimulus spacing, and stimuli were logarithmically or linearly spaced between standard "short" and "long" durations of 1 and 4, or 2 and 8 sec. A slight leftward shift of the psychophysical function was found in the logarithmic spacing condition, relative to linear spacing. Four other groups tested the conjecture that the ratio of the short and long standards might play some role in determining the location of the bisection point, and conditions with long/short ratios of 2:1 and 5:1 were used. In all cases the bisection point was close to the arithmetic mean of the short and long standards, rather than the geometric mean, as in animal studies. Overall, however, smaller long/short ratios (which may indicate more difficult temporal discriminations) produced more sensitive timing. When the long/short ratio was held constant, however, data showed nearly perfect superimposition, indicating conformity to scalar timing. In general, results were similar to those from experiments with humans that used much shorter durations, indicating the animal/human differences in bisection do not depend on the absolute lengths of the stimuli used.