Temporal interval production and short-term memory

Temporal order in memory and interval timing: An interference analysis

“…Whereas adding digits during time discrimination disturbed timing performance, letter or visual pattern recognition did not. As stated by the authors, the absence of interference from retention tasks in Experiments 2 and 3 may be explained by the fact that these tasks involved passive storage of information essentially, which was shown in previous studies not to affect concurrent timing (Fortin & Massé, 1999; see also Field & Groeger, 2004); , and possibly also of athe relatively low level of task difficulty in those experiments may also have been a factor. There was a slight effect of performing concurrent timing concurrently on recognition errors in the spatial memory task, but disruption of recognition in the visuospatial task was clearly weaker than the corresponding effect of arithmetic on timing.…”

“…In the second experiment of the present study, the number of items to be maintained in their correct temporal order was varied during a time interval production task, and this condition was compared directly with a similar load manipulation involving the retrieval of retrieving information on temporal order. Although previous results (Field & Groeger, 2004;Fortin & Massé, 1999;Rammsayer & Ulrich, 2005) suggest that a dissociation should be obtained such that produced intervals would lengthen with increasing load in the processing task but not in the retention task, increasing load in the passive retention condition might also affect time production because the memory and timing tasks both require to the maintenance of maintain temporal information.…”

“…Memory processing often perturbs concurrent timing but there is usually no such effect with maintenance of information in memory (Field & Groeger, 2004;Fortin & Breton, 1995;Fortin & Massé, 1999;Rammsayer & Ulrich, 2005). However, produced intervals were lengthened by increasing the number of tone durations to remember during an interval production, which was considered to be caused by both tasks requiring remembering temporal information (Field & Groeger,Exp.…”

“…This dissociation between the effects of processing and maintenance of information in memory on concurrent time production was investigated thoroughly in a subsequent study; results showed , in which there was no effect of that increasing the number of colors or tone timbres to retain during a time production task had no effect (Field & Groeger, 2004, Experiments 2 and 3) whereas retention of pitch information or tone durations showed load-related effects (Experiments 1 and 4). The interference from pitch maintenance was considered as a particular case, but interference from maintenance of tones durations was attributed to the common requirement of retaining temporal information in the memory task and in the time production task.…”

“…A shortening of perceived time with increasing difficulty of concurrent processing was obtained with a wide range of tasks involving perceptual (Brown, 1985;Casini & Macar, 1997;Coull, Vidal, Nazarian, & Macar, 2004;Field & Groeger, 2004;Macar, 2002;Zakay, 1993), memory (e.g., Fortin & Couture, 2002;Fortin & Massé, 1999;Hicks & Brundige, 1974;Rammsayer & Ulrich, 2005), and verbal (McClain, 1983;Miller, Hicks, & Willette, 1978;Zakay, 1989) processing.…”