Temporal Context Influences the Perceived Duration of Everyday Actions: Assessing the Ecological Validity of Lab-Based Timing Phenomena

Schlichting, Nadine; Damsma, Atser; Aksoy, Eren Erdal; Wächter, Mirko; Asfour, Tamim; Rijn, Hedderik van

doi:10.5334/joc.4

Cited by 21 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Similar reasoning also holds when considering the parameterization of the task used to measure the context effects. For example, in the work reported in this study, we remained close to our earlier studies in which we asked participants to end a machine-initiated interval by a single keypress (e.g., Schlichting et al, 2018;Van Rijn & Taatgen, 2008). However, it has been demonstrated that the method used for reproducing durations influenced both accuracy and precision, with an offset-keypress associated with lower precision than having the participant keep a key depressed for the duration of the reproduction (Mioni, Stablum, McClintock, & Grondin, 2014, see also Damsma, Schlichting, & Rijn, 2019).…”

Section: Bottom-up Influencesmentioning

confidence: 75%

Eliciting contextual temporal calibration: The effect of bottom-up and top-down information in reproduction tasks

2019

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A B S T R A C TBayesian integration assumes that a current observation is integrated with previous observations. An example in the temporal domain is the central tendency effect: when a range of durations is presented, a regression towards the mean is observed. Furthermore, a context effect emerges if a partially overlapping lower and a higher range of durations is presented in a blocked design, with the overlapping durations pulled towards the mean duration of the block. We determine under which conditions this context effect is observed, and whether explicit cues strengthen the effect. Each block contained either two or three durations, with one duration present in both blocks. We provided either no information at the start of each block about the nature of that block, provided written ("short" / "long" or "A" / "B") categorizations, or operationalized pitch (low vs high) to reflect the temporal context. We demonstrate that (1) the context effect emerges as long as sufficiently distinct durations are presented; (2) the effect is not modulated by explicit instructions or other cues; (3) just a single additional duration is sufficient to produce a context effect. Taken together, these results provide information on the most efficient operationalization to evoke the context effect, allowing for highly economical experimental designs, and highlights the automaticity by which priors are constructed.

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Section: Bottom-up Influencesmentioning

confidence: 75%

Eliciting contextual temporal calibration: The effect of bottom-up and top-down information in reproduction tasks

2019

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“…Whereas participants might be influenced by recent objective durations, it is also possible that they rely on their subjective experience of this objective duration, i.e., their own temporal production (e.g., Schlichting et al, 2018). To test this idea, we again started with the previously established model mentioned in Section 3.4.1, and sequentially added previous subjective durations (in trial N-1, N-2, N-3, etc.…”

Section: Subjective Previous Durationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, in certain phases of the experiment, a participant might be less willing to make longer responses compared to other phases. To disentangle the influence of the previous subjective duration from this local performance drift, we calculated the relative error of the reproduction in each trial (error = [reproduced duration -objective duration]/objective duration) (see Schlichting et al, 2018). In the case of performance drift, we would expect that a negative error (that is, a too short reproduction) in the previous trial would also lead to negative error in the current trial.…”

Section: Subjective Previous Durationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The dynamic effect of context on interval timing in children and adults

et al. 2019

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Human reproductions of time intervals are often biased toward previously perceived durations, resulting in a central tendency effect. The aim of the current study was to compare this effect of temporal context on time reproductions within children and adults. Children aged from 5 to 7 years, as well as adults, performed a readyset-go reproduction task with a short and a long duration distribution. A central tendency effect was observed both in children and adults, with no age-difference in the effect of global context on temporal performance. However, the analysis of the effect of local context (trial-by-trial) indicated that younger children relied more on the duration (objective duration) presented in the most recent trial than adults. In addition, statistical analyses of the influence on temporal performance of recently reproduced durations by subjects (subjective duration) revealed that temporal reproductions in adults were influenced by performance drifts, i.e., their evaluation of their temporal error, while children simply relied on the value of reproduced durations on the recent trials. We argue that the central tendency effect was larger in young children due to their noisier internal representation of durations: A noisy system led participants to base their estimation on experienced duration rather than on the evaluation of their judgment.

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“…Although there is abundant behavioral evidence for Bayesian integration in human time perception (Acerbi, Wolpert, & Vijayakumar, 2012;Cicchini, Arrighi, Cecchetti, Giusti, & Burr, 2012;Gu, Jurkowski, Lake, Malapani, & Meck, 2015;Hallez, Damsma, Rhodes, van Rijn, & Droit-Volet, 2019;Jazayeri & Shadlen, 2010;Maaß, Riemer, Wolbers, & van Rijn, 2019;Maaß, Schlichting, & van Rijn, 2019;Roach, McGraw, Whitaker, & Heron, 2017;Schlichting et al, 2018;Shi, Church, & Meck, 2013), its temporal locus and neural underpinnings are not yet understood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal context actively shapes EEG signatures of time perception

Damsma

Schlichting

Rijn

2020

Preprint

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Our subjective perception of time is optimized to temporal regularities in the environment. This is illustrated by the central tendency effect: when estimating a range of intervals, short intervals are overestimated whereas long intervals are underestimated to reduce the overall estimation error. Most models of interval timing ascribe this effect to the weighting of the current interval with previous memory traces after the interval has been perceived. Alternatively, the perception of the duration could already be flexibly tuned to its temporal context. We investigated this hypothesis using an interval reproduction task with a shorter and longer interval range. As expected, reproductions were biased towards the subjective mean of each presented range. EEG analysis showed that temporal context affected neural dynamics during the perception phase. Specifically, longer previous durations decreased CNV and P2 amplitude and increased beta power. In addition, multivariate pattern analysis showed that it is possible to decode context from the transient EEG signal quickly after the onset and offset of the perception phase. Together, these results suggest that temporal context creates dynamic expectations which actively affect the perception of duration.The subjective sense of duration does not arise in isolation, but is informed by previous experiences. This is demonstrated by abundant evidence showing that duration estimates are biased towards previously perceived time intervals. However, it is yet unknown whether this temporal context actively affects perception or asserts its influence in later, post-perceptual stages as proposed by most current formal models of this task. Using an interval reproduction task, we here show that EEG signatures flexibly adapt to the temporal context during perceptual encoding. Furthermore, interval history could be decoded from the transient EEG signal even when the current duration was identical.All in all, our results suggest that context actively influences perception.

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Temporal Context Influences the Perceived Duration of Everyday Actions: Assessing the Ecological Validity of Lab-Based Timing Phenomena

Cited by 21 publications

References 32 publications

Eliciting contextual temporal calibration: The effect of bottom-up and top-down information in reproduction tasks

Eliciting contextual temporal calibration: The effect of bottom-up and top-down information in reproduction tasks

The dynamic effect of context on interval timing in children and adults

Temporal context actively shapes EEG signatures of time perception

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