The Temporal Oddball Effect and Related Phenomena: Cognitive Mechanisms and Experimental Approaches

Abstract

A prominent illusion in time perception is the temporal oddball effect. Specifically, people overestimate the duration of rare events embedded in a stream of homogenous events. We will provide a comprehensive review of studies that are devoted to establish and understand the origin of this phenomenon. We give an overview about the various experimental approaches used in the investigation of the oddball effect as well as potential limitations and caveats associated with these methods. Then we consider various studies that examined the generality of the oddball effect and also propose explanations of why this effect occurs. The currently most plausible explanation assumes two independent mechanisms that exert opposite effects on the perceived duration: (a) low-level repetition suppression and (b) high-level stimulus expectations.