Contextual effects in interval-duration judgements in vision, audition and touch

We examined the effect of temporal context on discrimination of intervals marked by auditory, visual and tactile stimuli. Subjects were asked to compare the duration of the interval immediately preceded by an irrelevant “distractor” stimulus with an interval with no distractor. For short interval durations, the presence of the distractor affected greatly the apparent duration of the test stimulus: short distractors caused the test interval to appear shorter and vice versa. For very short reference durations (≤100 ms), the contextual effects were large, changing perceived duration by up to a factor of two. The effect of distractors reduced steadily for longer reference durations, to zero effect for durations greater than 500 ms. We found similar results for intervals defined by visual flashes, auditory tones and brief finger vibrations, all falling to zero effect at 500 ms. Under appropriate conditions, there were strong cross-modal interactions, particularly from audition to vision. We also measured the Weber fractions for duration discrimination and showed that under the conditions of this experiment, Weber fractions decreased steadily with duration, following a square-root law, similarly for all three modalities. The magnitude of the effect of the distractors on apparent duration correlated well with Weber fraction, showing that when duration discrimination was relatively more precise, the context dependency was less. The results were well fit by a simple Bayesian model combining noisy estimates of duration with the action of a resonance-like mechanism that tended to regularize the sound sequence intervals.

[1]  Yoshitaka Nakajima,et al.  Time-Shrinking: The Process of Unilateral Temporal Assimilation , 2004, Perception.

[2]  Henry Markram,et al.  Real-Time Computing Without Stable States: A New Framework for Neural Computation Based on Perturbations , 2002, Neural Computation.

[3]  H. Hollingworth.  The Central Tendency of Judgment , 1910 .

[4]  C. Gallistel,et al.  Toward a neurobiology of temporal cognition: advances and challenges , 1997, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[5]  Jan B. F. van Erp,et al.  Time-Shrinking and the Design of Tactons , 2008, EuroHaptics.

[6]  Catalin V. Buhusi,et al.  What makes us tick? Functional and neural mechanisms of interval timing , 2005, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[7]  U. Karmarkar,et al.  Timing in the Absence of Clocks: Encoding Time in Neural Network States , 2007, Neuron.

[8]  Richard B Ivry,et al.  Evaluating dedicated and intrinsic models of temporal encoding by varying context , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[9]  J. Devin McAuley,et al.  Modeling effects of rhythmic context on perceived duration: a comparison of interval and entrainment approaches to short-interval timing. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[10]  A. Watson,et al.  Quest: A Bayesian adaptive psychometric method , 1983, Perception & psychophysics.

[11]  D. Burr,et al.  Auditory dominance over vision in the perception of interval duration , 2009, Experimental Brain Research.

[12]  Ryota Miyauchi,et al.  Bilateral Assimilation of Two Neighboring Empty Time Intervals , 2005 .

[13]  D V Buonomano,et al.  Decoding Temporal Information: A Model Based on Short-Term Synaptic Plasticity , 2000, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[14]  R. Miall,et al.  The precision of temporal judgement: milliseconds, many minutes, and beyond , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[15]  M M Merzenich,et al.  Temporal information transformed into a spatial code by a neural network with realistic properties , 1995, Science.

[16]  Yoshitaka Nakajima,et al.  Time-shrinking: A discontinuity in the perception of auditory temporal patterns , 1992, Perception & psychophysics.

[17]  Ake Hellstrom,et al.  The time-order error and its relatives: Mirrors of cognitive processes in comparing. , 1985 .

[18]  R. Ivry.  The representation of temporal information in perception and motor control , 1996, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[19]  Yoshitaka Nakajima,et al.  A New Illusion of Time Perception , 1991 .

[20]  I J Hirsh,et al.  Studies in auditory timing: 2. Rhythm patterns , 1990, Perception & psychophysics.

[21]  R. Shephard.  Regression to the Mean , 2003, Sports medicine.

[22]  C. Douglas Creelman,et al.  Human Discrimination of Auditory Duration , 1962 .

[23]  D. Burr,et al.  Optimal Encoding of Interval Timing in Expert Percussionists , 2011, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[24]  M. Treisman.  Temporal discrimination and the indifference interval. Implications for a model of the "internal clock". , 1963, Psychological monographs.

[25]  T J Sejnowski,et al.  Motion integration and postdiction in visual awareness. , 2000, Science.

[26]  J. Gibbon.  Scalar expectancy theory and Weber's law in animal timing. , 1977 .

[27]  Kazuyuki Aihara,et al.  Auditory Time-Interval Perception as Causal Inference on Sound Sources , 2012, Front. Psychology.

[28]  Y. Nakajima,et al.  Does Time-Shrinking Take Place in Visual Temporal Patterns? , 2000, Perception.

[29]  Dean V Buonomano,et al.  Book Review: How Do We Tell Time? , 2002, The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry.

[30]  Michael N. Shadlen,et al.  Temporal context calibrates interval timing , 2010, Nature Neuroscience.

[31]  J. Devin McAuley,et al.  Time judgments in global temporal contexts , 2005, Perception & psychophysics.

[32]  Maria Concetta Morrone,et al.  Temporal mechanisms of multimodal binding , 2009, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[33]  M. Ernst,et al.  Humans integrate visual and haptic information in a statistically optimal fashion , 2002, Nature.