Duration Judgments Research Articles

Web party effect: a cocktail party effect in the web environment.

In goal-directed web navigation, labels compete for selection: this process often involves knowledge integration and requires selective attention to manage the dizziness of web layouts. Here we ask whether the competition for selection depends on all web navigation options or only on those options that are more likely to be useful for information seeking, and provide evidence in favor of the latter alternative. Participants in our experiment navigated a representative set of real websites of variable complexity, in order to reach an information goal located two clicks away from the starting home page. The time needed to reach the goal was accounted for by a novel measure of home page complexity based on a part of (not all) web options: the number of links embedded within web navigation elements weighted by the number and type of embedding elements. Our measure fully mediated the effect of several standard complexity metrics (the overall number of links, words, images, graphical regions, the JPEG file size of home page screenshots) on information seeking time and usability ratings. Furthermore, it predicted the cognitive demand of web navigation, as revealed by the duration judgment ratio (i.e., the ratio of subjective to objective duration of information search). Results demonstrate that focusing on relevant links while ignoring other web objects optimizes the deployment of attentional resources necessary to navigation. This is in line with a web party effect (i.e., a cocktail party effect in the web environment): users tune into web elements that are relevant for the achievement of their navigation goals and tune out all others.

Filling the blanks in temporal intervals: the type of filling influences perceived duration and discrimination performance.

In this work we investigate how judgments of perceived duration are influenced by the properties of the signals that define the intervals. Participants compared two auditory intervals that could be any combination of the following four types: intervals filled with continuous tones (filled intervals), intervals filled with regularly-timed short tones (isochronous intervals), intervals filled with irregularly-timed short tones (anisochronous intervals), and intervals demarcated by two short tones (empty intervals). Results indicate that the type of intervals to be compared affects discrimination performance and induces distortions in perceived duration. In particular, we find that duration judgments are most precise when comparing two isochronous and two continuous intervals, while the comparison of two anisochronous intervals leads to the worst performance. Moreover, we determined that the magnitude of the distortions in perceived duration (an effect akin to the filled duration illusion) is higher for tone sequences (no matter whether isochronous or anisochronous) than for continuous tones. Further analysis of how duration distortions depend on the type of filling suggests that distortions are not only due to the perceived duration of the two individual intervals, but they may also be due to the comparison of two different filling types.

Listening Under Cognitive Load Makes Speech Sound Fast

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2015) Listening under cognitive load makes speech sound fast Hans Rutger Bosker 1 , Eva Reinisch 2 , and Matthias Sjerps 3 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA HansRutger.Bosker@mpi.nl; evarei@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de; m.j.sjerps@gmail.com Index Terms: cognitive load, rate normalization, speech rate, speech perception 1. Introduction Listeners interpret local temporal cues (e.g., vowel durations) relative to the surrounding speech rate. For instance, an ambiguous Dutch vowel midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/ may be perceived as long /a:/ when presented in a fast context, but as short /ɑ/ in a slow context [1]. It is widely assumed that this process known as rate normalization is an early general auditory process [1, 2], and as such would operate independent from other higher level influences such as attention. However, when the perceptual system is taxed by the concurrent execution of another task, the encoding of the incoming speech signal is known to be negatively affected [3]. Therefore, listening to, for example, fast speech under cognitive load may result in impoverished encoding of the fast speech rate, reducing the effect that a fast context may have on the perception of subsequent speech (i.e., a reduction of the rate effect; cf. [4]). Alternatively, an increase in cognitive load has been shown to speed up time perception (the “shrinking of time”, [5]), potentially increasing the perceived rate of concurrent speech. This argument has, for instance, been used to explain why foreign-accented speech sounds faster than native speech [6]. Here we attempt to distinguish between these alternatives by testing Dutch /ɑ/-/a:/ categorization as a function of (1) the rate of the preceding carrier sentence and (2) the difficulty of a dual task (visual search) performed during carrier presentation. Figure 1: Average percentage long vowel responses split by load condition and carrier rate. the target word was presented. Note that the visual search task was only performed during carrier presentation, not during the target word. Participants first indicated by button press which word they had heard sentence-finally, and then indicated whether or not they had seen the oddball in the visual display. 3. Results Visual search accuracy differed across cognitive load conditions (low: 96%; high: 68%) suggesting that the load manipulation was effective. Speech target categorization functions are displayed in Figure 1. Statistical analyses using GLM models [7] show main effects for the two Vowel Step comparisons (V2 vs. V1, β = 2.262, p < 0.001; V2 vs. V3, β = 2.344, p < 0.001), Carrier Rate (β = 0.538, p < 0.001), and Load (β = 0.411, p = 0.004). No interaction between Load and Rate was found, but an interaction between Rate and Vowel Step indicated a larger effect of Rate for Vowel Step 3 (β = 0.451, p = 0.001). 2. Method Data from 29 participants with normal hearing and vision were collected. Dutch speech materials were adopted from [1], including a semantically neutral carrier sentence in a fast (793 ms) and a slow version (1648 ms), that ended in a minimal word pair. The vowel in the sentence-final target word was spectrally ambiguous between /ɑ/ and /a:/ and was presented at three different durations in the ambiguous range (V1 = relatively long, V3 = relatively short; see [1]). The dual task (visual search) was adopted from [3]. Visual displays consisted of an equal number of black squares, black triangles, red triangles, red diamonds, and on half of the trials one oddball: a black diamond. Low and high cognitive load conditions (4x4 vs. 13x13 grids) were blocked (order counter- balanced across participants; total 432 trials). A trial started with the onset of the visual grid. After 250 ms of silence, the carrier sentence was played. At carrier offset, the visual grid was replaced by a response screen and 4. Discussion We tested whether the presumed early auditory process of rate normalization may be affected by cognitive load. Results indicated that cognitive load did not modulate rate normalization. Rather, a main effect of load indicated that the execution of a concurrent secondary task led to a higher proportion of long vowel responses. This suggests that under cognitive load, the carrier sentences were perceived as relatively fast. This main effect could be explained by a model for contextual influences on duration judgments that involves 1) an automatic mechanism [1, 2] unaffected by attention; and 2) an attention-dependent mechanism, accounting for higher level influences (cf. [6]) such as cognitive load.

The Relationship between Time Perception and Emotional Interference on Autobiographical Memories

Over the past three decades studies have investigated whether people are able to look back in time and perceive themselves from a field (first-person) or observer perspective. A major field of cognitive psychology looked at time perception and memory and depended on emotional factors. The objective of the current research was to investigate the relationship of time estimations and emotional interference on autobiographical memories and whether perception of the field/ observer is related to the emotional factor. Two studies were conducted. In study.1 (pilot), participants were asked to recall a positive, negative, or a neutral autobiographical memory dating three to six years prior to the study. In study.2, participants were exposed to all three emotional autobiographical memory conditions during the task. Finally, each participants was asked whether they could look back and choose if they could perceive themselves as firstperson (field), or observer, or both in a given event. Results on both studies rejected the hypotheses and suggested no significant results. Participants showed no differences in their objective and subjective duration judgements of the original events and whether they perceive them to be firstperson, observer, or even both. These findings suggests further study in this field is needed as under certain experimental methods, emotional interferences and time perception may have an impact on one’s autobiographical memory.

Attentional entrainment and perceived event duration.

This study considered the contribution of dynamic attending theory (DAT) and attentional entrainment to systematic distortions in perceived event duration. Three experiments were conducted using an auditory oddball paradigm, in which listeners judged the duration of a deviant (oddball) stimulus embedded within a series of identical (standard) stimuli. To test for a role of attentional entrainment in perceived oddball duration, oddballs were presented at either temporally expected (on time) or unexpectedly early or late time points relative to extrapolation of the context rhythm. Consistent with involvement of attentional entrainment in perceived duration, duration judgements about the oddball were least distorted when the oddball occurred on time with respect to the entrained rhythm, whereas durations of early and late oddballs were perceived to be shorter and longer, respectively. This pattern of results was independent of the absolute time interval preceding the oddball. Moreover, as expected, an irregularly timed sequence context weakened observed differences between oddballs with on-time and late onsets. Combined with other recent work on the role of temporal preparation in duration distortions, the present findings allot at least a portion of the oddball effect to increased attention to events that are more expected, rather than on their unexpected nature per se.

Crossmodal attention switching: Auditory dominance in temporal discrimination tasks

Visual stimuli are often processed more efficiently than accompanying stimuli in another modality. In line with this “visual dominance”, earlier studies on attentional switching showed a clear benefit for visual stimuli in a bimodal visual–auditory modality-switch paradigm that required spatial stimulus localization in the relevant modality. The present study aimed to examine the generality of this visual dominance effect. The modality appropriateness hypothesis proposes that stimuli in different modalities are differentially effectively processed depending on the task dimension, so that processing of visual stimuli is favored in the dimension of space, whereas processing auditory stimuli is favored in the dimension of time. In the present study, we examined this proposition by using a temporal duration judgment in a bimodal visual–auditory switching paradigm. Two experiments demonstrated that crossmodal interference (i.e., temporal stimulus congruence) was larger for visual stimuli than for auditory stimuli, suggesting auditory dominance when performing temporal judgment tasks. However, attention switch costs were larger for the auditory modality than for visual modality, indicating a dissociation of the mechanisms underlying crossmodal competition in stimulus processing and modality-specific biasing of attentional set.

Transcranial electrical brain stimulation modulates neuronal tuning curves in perception of numerosity and duration

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation method with many putative applications and reported to effectively modulate behaviour. However, its effects have yet to be considered at a computational level. To address this we modelled the tuning curves underlying the behavioural effects of stimulation in a perceptual task. Participants judged which of the two serially presented images contained more items (numerosity judgement task) or was presented longer (duration judgement task). During presentation of the second image their posterior parietal cortices (PPCs) were stimulated bilaterally with opposite polarities for 1.6s. We also examined the impact of three stimulation conditions on behaviour: anodal right-PPC and cathodal left-PPC (rA-lC), reverse order (lA-rC) and no-stimulation condition. Behavioural results showed that participants were more accurate in numerosity and duration judgement tasks when they were stimulated with lA-rC and rA-lC stimulation conditions respectively. Simultaneously, a decrease in performance on numerosity and duration judgement tasks was observed when the stimulation condition favoured the other task. Thus, our results revealed a double-dissociation of laterality and task. Importantly, we were able to model the effects of stimulation on behaviour. Our computational modelling showed that participants' superior performance was attributable to a narrower tuning curve — smaller standard deviation of detection noise. We believe that this approach may prove useful in understanding the impact of brain stimulation on other cognitive domains.

Flicker-Induced Time Dilation Does Not Modulate EEG Correlates of Temporal Encoding.

In this study, we used EEG to investigate how visual stimulus dynamics (i.e. flicker) affect the mechanisms of duration perception. Previous studies have demonstrated that flickering visual stimuli are judged longer than equally long non-flickering stimuli. We tested whether this effect of flicker on duration judgments is mediated by changes in temporal encoding during the time interval. Here, temporal encoding refers to the perception of the unfolding of time throughout the temporal interval, also termed the "clock stage" in information processing models of interval timing. We hypothesized that if flicker mediates duration perception by affecting temporal encoding, then the dilation-effect should be reflected by neural correlates of temporal encoding. We presented flickering and steady stimuli in a duration bisection task and found that flicker dilated perceived duration. The EEG analysis allowed us to isolate a putative neural correlate of temporal encoding: a modulation of the amplitude of the contingent negative variation (CNV) by stimuli classified as "long" compared to physically identical stimuli classified as "short". However, flicker did not affect the CNV amplitude, suggesting that flicker does not dilate perceived duration by affecting temporal encoding. Possibly, flicker might affect only later stages of temporal processing such as interval comparison or decision making.

Does time ever fly or slow down? The difficult interpretation of psychophysical data on time perception.

Time perception is studied with subjective or semi-objective psychophysical methods. With subjective methods, observers provide quantitative estimates of duration and data depict the psychophysical function relating subjective duration to objective duration. With semi-objective methods, observers provide categorical or comparative judgments of duration and data depict the psychometric function relating the probability of a certain judgment to objective duration. Both approaches are used to study whether subjective and objective time run at the same pace or whether time flies or slows down under certain conditions. We analyze theoretical aspects affecting the interpretation of data gathered with the most widely used semi-objective methods, including single-presentation and paired-comparison methods. For this purpose, a formal model of psychophysical performance is used in which subjective duration is represented via a psychophysical function and the scalar property. This provides the timing component of the model, which is invariant across methods. A decisional component that varies across methods reflects how observers use subjective durations to make judgments and give the responses requested under each method. Application of the model shows that psychometric functions in single-presentation methods are uninterpretable because the various influences on observed performance are inextricably confounded in the data. In contrast, data gathered with paired-comparison methods permit separating out those influences. Prevalent approaches to fitting psychometric functions to data are also discussed and shown to be inconsistent with widely accepted principles of time perception, implicitly assuming instead that subjective time equals objective time and that observed differences across conditions do not reflect differences in perceived duration but criterion shifts. These analyses prompt evidence-based recommendations for best methodological practice in studies on time perception.

Exploring the cognitive load of negative thinking: A novel dual-task experiment

Background and ObjectivesFemales are more likely to engage in the preoccupation of past negative experiences than males, which might contribute to their greater tendency toward depression. However, there is limited understanding regarding the cognitive basis for the negative autobiographical information processing of females. In the present study, we assessed the cognitive resources required for negative thinking, by using a novel dual-task paradigm that combined think-aloud and time-estimation tasks. MethodsFifty-three Japanese undergraduate students were asked to think aloud about personal past or future emotional episodes for a particular duration. In addition, they were asked to estimate the duration of their speech. Their estimates were compared to the actual time taken, and the errors were used as indices of cognitive burden during the speech task. ResultsAs compared to males, females exhibited greater judgment errors, particularly when thinking about their past negative experiences. This suggests that females allocate more attentional resources toward thinking about the past. LimitationsParticipants could rehearse the task during the time reproduction phase, and the quality of the rehearsal and their memory capacity might have influenced the accuracy of their duration judgment. ConclusionsFemales tend to allocate more attentional resources than males to thinking about past negative episodes, which in turn might be associated with reduced availability of resources for central cognitive control processes such as inhibition of and switching away from processing of negative autobiographical information.

The effect of nontemporal stimulus size on perceived duration as assessed by the method of reproduction.

Perceived duration is assumed to be positively related to nontemporal stimulus magnitude. Most recently, the finding that larger stimuli are perceived to last longer has been challenged to represent a mere decisional bias induced by the use of comparative duration judgments. Therefore, in the present study, the method of temporal reproduction was applied as a psychophysical procedure to quantify perceived duration. Another major goal was to investigate the influence of attention on the effect of visual stimulus size on perceived duration. For this purpose, an additional dual-task paradigm was employed. Our results not only converged with previous findings in demonstrating a functional positive relationship between nontemporal stimulus size and perceived duration, but also showed that the effect of stimulus size on perceived duration was not confined to comparative duration judgments. Furthermore, the effect of stimulus size proved to be independent of attentional resources allocated to stimulus size; nontemporal visual stimulus information does not need to be processed intentionally to influence perceived duration. Finally, the effect of nontemporal stimulus size on perceived duration was effectively modulated by the duration of the target intervals, suggesting a hitherto largely unrecognized role of temporal context for the effect of nontemporal stimulus size to become evident.

Time perception and temporal order memory

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relation between the attentional resources underlying time perception and temporal order memory. Subjects made judgments about temporal attributes associated with a series of wordlists. Each word was displayed for 1.4s, and the lists contained 10 words (14s total), 15 words (21s total), or 20 words (28s total). Subjects judged either the list duration, the temporal order of the words, or both duration and temporal order. In addition, there were three mental workload conditions: control (no additional task requirements), and two mental arithmetic tasks (subtract 3 or subtract 7 from a series of random numbers). The results showed a pattern of bidirectional interference between timing and temporal order: the concurrent temporal order task interfered with duration judgments, and the concurrent timing task interfered with temporal order judgments. Bidirectional interference also occurred between the mental workload task and both duration judgments and temporal order judgments. The results indicate that duration and temporal order are closely related temporal attributes, and suggest that the processing of these attributes relies on a common set of executive attentional resources.

Individual differences in self-attributed mindfulness levels are related to the experience of time and cognitive self-control

The objective of this correlational study was to investigate how dispositional mindfulness is related to the experience of time as operationalized by the assessment of the time perspectives, impulsiveness, and duration judgment tasks. A sample of students (N=63) completed self-report measures of mindfulness (FMI, CHIME), the time perspectives (ZTPI), impulsiveness (BIS), conducted psychophysical tasks of (a) auditory duration discrimination in the milliseconds range, (b) visual duration reproduction in the multiple-second range, and performed an attention task, the Attention Network Test. Being more mindful in daily life was related to less impulsiveness, better emotional handling of the past, and a more pronounced future perspective. Mindfulness was also related to more accurate timing in the milliseconds and multiple-seconds range but not to attentional control. These findings suggest a close association between dispositional mindfulness with the temporal organization of behaviour and the perception of time.

Unifying Prospective and Retrospective Interval-time Estimation: A Fading-gaussian Activation-based Model of Interval-timing

Hass and Hermann (2012) have shown that only variance-based processes will lead to the scalar growth of error that is characteristic of human time judgments. Secondly, a major meta-review of over one hundred studies (Block et al., 2010) reveals a striking interaction between the way in which temporal judgments are queried and cognitive load on participants’ judgments of interval duration. For retrospective time judgments, estimates under high cognitive load are longer than under low cognitive load. For prospective judgments, the reverse pattern holds, with increased cognitive load leading to shorter estimates. We describe GAMIT, a Gaussian spreading-activation model, in which the sampling rate of an activation trace is differentially affected by cognitive load. The model unifies prospective and retrospective time estimation, normally considered separately, by relating them to the same underlying process. The scalar property of time estimation arises naturally from the model dynamics and the model shows the appropriate interaction between mode of query and cognitive load.

Perception of Duration with Irregularly Filled Intervals

The perception of interval duration can be distorted by a multitude of factors related to stimulus characteristics. One of them is the filled-duration illusion, where filled intervals are perceived to be longer than their empty counterparts. The filled-duration illusion has been shown to occur with intervals consisting of one continuous signal (e.g., Wearden et al., 2007). Most notably, however, the illusion also occurs with intervals containing several short signals (“fillers”) in between a beginning and an end marker (e.g., Thomas & Brown, 1974). Only few investigations have looked at the effect of the filler signal characteristics on the perception of duration. The present work focused on the role of regular versus irregular spacing of filler signals in interval duration judgments. Stimuli were auditory filled intervals between 0.5 and 1.5 s duration, marked by five 10ms 1000Hz filler tones. Five different levels of irregularity in the timing of the fillers were defined, ranging from regular (that is, spacing between every two neighboring fillers is equal) to 50% of the regular spacing. In a two-interval forced choice task, participants judged which of two intervals appeared longer. One interval was always regular, while the other one was irregular. The serial position of the physically longer interval as well as the irregular interval were counterbalanced and randomized. Psychometric functions were fitted to the proportion of responses plotted as a function of the difference in duration. The point of subjective equality and the just noticeable difference were estimated. While the variation in irregularity did not affect duration discrimination sensitivity, results indicate that irregular intervals are judged to last shorter than regular ones of the same physical duration and this effect increases with the amount of irregularity. Furthermore in trials where the regular interval precedes the irregular one, irregular intervals were specifically judged shorter than their regular counterparts, when the first interval between fillers was significantly longer than the second one. These findings suggest that duration perception of filled intervals can be affected by the properties and regularity of the individual filler stimuli, opening the road to a new interpretation of the reasons behind the filled-duration illusion. Implications for a computational model of interval duration perception are discussed considering the perception of filler stimulus timing to be affected by the expectation built up from previously presented stimuli.

Differences in perceptual latency estimated from judgments of temporal order, simultaneity and duration are inconsistent.

Differences in perceptual latency (ΔL) for two stimuli, such as an auditory and a visual stimulus, can be estimated from temporal order judgments (TOJ) and simultaneity judgments (SJ), but previous research has found evidence that ΔL estimated from these tasks do not coincide. Here, using an auditory and a visual stimulus we confirmed this and further show that ΔL as estimated from duration judgments also does not coincide with ΔL estimated from TOJ or SJ. These inconsistencies suggest that each judgment is subject to different processes that bias ΔL in different ways: TOJ might be affected by sensory interactions, a bias associated with the method of single stimuli and an order difficulty bias; SJ by sensory interactions and an asymmetrical criterion bias; duration judgments by an order duration bias.

Encoding of Duration and Rate by an Integrative Model of Temporal Processing

Several models of temporal processing have been proposed in the empirical literature on time perception; all have been developed as models of a single temporal property, primarily event duration. We argue that there is ample reason to expand upon these models in order to include the processing of both rate and duration. We describe several ways that two popular timing models could handle rate, and illustrate that they would lead to different patterns of co-variation of rate and duration judgments. We review evidence that seemingly indicates discrepancies between the manner in which rate and duration are processed, and show that this evidence is problematic. A failure to carefully consider more global models has led to overly hasty arguments derived from empirical results suggesting a necessary dissociation between mechanisms of rate and duration. We argue instead that these findings place important constraints on how a global model might function, but do not rule out a common mechanism for rate and duration judgment.

Working Memory Modulates the Association between Time and Number Representation

Time and numbers are interconnected in mental representation. Here we investigated whether this interaction between time and number could be modulated by working memory (WM). In experiment 1 participants first memorized a digit and then judged which of the two digits presented in succession were presented for longer (or shorter), with either one or neither of them being the same as the WM digit. The results showed that, when one of two digits was the same as the WM content, the numerical magnitude effect on temporal performance was abolished, whereas the interference effect occurred only when both the two digits were not the same as the WM content. In order to further investigate whether this effect was due to stimuli repetition, we instructed participants in experiment 2 to merely attend to the original digit but not memorize it during a time judgment task. The results did not reveal the modulation of WM content on time-number link. The WM-based interference effect, however, might reflect decision bias rather than perception illusion. In experiment 3 we eliminated response biases by using equality judgments, and found that WM content had no impact on time-number link. Finally, we conducted experiment 4 (comparative duration judgment) and experiment 5 (equality duration judgment) by manipulating WM load, and demonstrated that the WM-based interference effect was relevant to the duration of the WM content solely in comparative judgment. We concluded that the mental association between time and number representation could be modulated by WM at decision level.

GAMIT – A Fading-Gaussian Activation Model of Interval-Timing: Unifying Prospective and Retrospective Time Estimation

Two recent findings constitute a serious challenge for all existing models of interval timing. First, Hass and Hermann (2012) have shown that only variance-based processes will lead to the scalar growth of error that is characteristic of human time judgments. Secondly, a major meta-review of over one hundred studies of participants’ judgments of interval duration (Block et al., 2010) reveals a striking interaction between the way in which temporal judgments are queried (i.e., retrospectively or prospectively) and cognitive load. For retrospective time judgments, estimates under high cognitive load are longer than under low cognitive load. For prospective judgments, the reverse pattern holds, with increased cognitive load leading to shorter estimates. We describe GAMIT, a Gaussian spreading activation model of interval timing, in which the decay and sampling rate of an activation trace are differentially affected by cognitive load. The model unifies prospective and retrospective time estimation, normally considered separately, by relating them to the same underlying process. The scalar property of time estimation arises naturally from the model dynamics and the model shows the appropriate interaction between mode of query and cognitive load.

The effects of numerical magnitude, size, and color saturation on perceived interval duration.

The relative magnitude (or intensity) of an event can have direct implications on timing estimation. Previous studies have found that greater magnitude stimuli are often reported as longer in duration than lesser magnitudes, including Arabic digits (Xuan, Zhang, He, & Chen, 2007). One explanation for these findings is that different quantitative dimensions (size, intensity, number) are processed and represented according to a common analog magnitude system (Walsh, 2003). In the current study, we examined whether there were commonalities in how people judge the intervals of time occurring between discrete stimuli of different magnitudes across a variety of quantitative dimensions, which included number, size, and color saturation. It was found that duration judgments increased systematically as the overall magnitude difference between sequentially presented stimuli increased. This finding was robust against manipulations to the direction of the sequence, or whether the sequence followed ordered (continuous) or nonordered (discontinuous) pattern trajectories.