Duration compression induced by visual and phonological repetition of Chinese characters

Abstract

Our prior experience heavily influences our subjective time. One of such phenomena is repetition compression, that is, repeated stimuli are perceived shorter than novel stimuli. However, most of the studies on repetition compression used identical stimuli, leaving the question whether similar repetition effects could take place in phonological and semantic level repetition. We used Chinese characters to manipulate different levels of repetition in a duration discrimination task. We replicated earlier findings that repetition of visual identical characters shortened the apparent duration and found the repetition compression was spatially independent. Phonological repetition also caused the duration compression though the effect was weaker than the visual repetition. However, we observed no duration compression during the semantic repetition. The results suggest that repetition compression is mediated by visual and phonological representation of a stimulus in an early stage in processing hierarchy. We explained our findings according to the framework of predictive coding.

The Modulation of Stimulus Familiarity on the Repetition Effect in Duration Judgment

“…This is important because the extant line of investigation has mainly focused on the effects of whole-stimulus repetition (e.g., picture, simple symbol, and character). It is important to highlight that these studies demonstrated the repetition duration compression (Matthews and Gheorghiu, 2016) and explained the phenomenon with bases on the predictive coding account (Schindel et al, 2011;Pariyadath and Eagleman, 2012;Jia and Shi, 2017;Saurels et al, 2019). Under this account, the magnitudes of the repetition effect reflect the discrepancy between the predicted and actual items in terms of their physical characteristics.…”

“…In other words, neural responses are suppressed for the predicted signals (repeated stimuli) and activated or even enhanced for the surprising stimuli (oddball/novel stimuli). The view of predictive coding was supported by a large number of studies (Matthews, 2011;Schindel et al, 2011;Pariyadath and Eagleman, 2012;Birngruber et al, 2015;Jia and Shi, 2017;Saurels et al, 2019). In this framework, the size of the repetition effect should be dependent on the similarity between the predicted and actual signals.…”

“…An additional branch of research has examined the influence of familiar (e.g., word) or unfamiliar stimuli (e.g., pseudowords) on the repetition effect over duration perception. It has been shown that both categories are prone to duration compression in relation to novel items (Matthews, 2011(Matthews, , 2015Birngruber et al, 2015;Cai et al, 2015;Jia and Shi, 2017). As an example, in a duration discrimination task, in which the participants had to respond whether the presentation time of the comparison stimulus was shorter or longer than that of the baseline, Birngruber et al (2015) found that the presentation of repeated unfamiliar pseudowords was judged as shorter in duration than that of a novel baseline stimulus.…”

“…As an example, in a duration discrimination task, in which the participants had to respond whether the presentation time of the comparison stimulus was shorter or longer than that of the baseline, Birngruber et al (2015) found that the presentation of repeated unfamiliar pseudowords was judged as shorter in duration than that of a novel baseline stimulus. Along with a similar method, namely, two-interval paradigm, Jia and Shi (2017) showed that participants tended to underestimate the apparent duration of the repetition of familiar stimuli (i.e., Chinese character).…”

“…Although the aforementioned studies demonstrated that the repetition of familiar or unfamiliar stimuli produces duration compression relative to novel stimuli (Matthews, 2011;Birngruber et al, 2015;Cai et al, 2015;Jia and Shi, 2017), it is vital to highlight that there has been little evidence of how the familiarity (i.e., words vs. pseudowords in the same study) influences the size of the repetition duration effect. Specifically, the question is to what extent familiarity interacts with the repetition duration effect.…”