The role of temporal properties on the detection of temporal violations: insights from pupillometry

Abstract

Scripts store the temporal order of component events of everyday activities as well as the temporal position of the events within the activity (early or late). When confronted with an activity, predictions are generated about how the component events will unfold. Thereby, an error-detection mechanism continuously monitors whether they unfold as anticipated or not in order to reveal errors in the unfolding activity. We investigated whether the temporal position "early" or "late" influenced the detection of errors using the pupillary response as an index of cognitive resource consumption. An event triplet consisting of three events was presented in a chronological or non-chronological temporal order. Crucially, the triplet focused either on the beginning (temporal position "early") or the end (temporal position "late") of an activity. We assumed that these position codes would be used to facilitate error detection when a non-chronological event was presented. Results showed that errors in the temporal order were detected more successfully in early than in late triplets. Results further suggest that strong predictions are formed about how an activity begins. Violations of this prediction must be overcome by zooming into the representation and allocating attention to the temporal position that consumes cognitive resources. Only after zooming in has taken place successfully may the position codes be used to anticipate temporal violations in unfolding event sequences.

Discerning Temporal Expectancy Effects in Script Processing: Evidence from Pupillary and Eye Movement Recordings

“…While we could not find direct support for this assumption in a previous study, we, nevertheless, showed that early and late events led to processing differences regarding cognitive resource consumption (Raisig, Hagendorf, & van der Meer 2011). Resource consumption was measured with the pupillary response (Beatty, 1982; Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000; Just, Carpenter, & Miyake, 2003).…”

The social pain of Cyberball: Decreased pupillary reactivity to exclusion cues

“…For example, the pupil unilaterally dilates in response to task error and incongruent trials during the Stroop task (Brown et al, 1999;Critchley, Tang, Glaser, Butterworth, & Dolan, 2005;Laeng, Ørbo, Holmlund, & Miozzo, 2011). Similarly, the pupil also responds to violations of expectations (Preuschoff, 't Hart, & Einhäuser, 2011;Raisig, Welke, Hagendorf, & van der Meer, 2010;Raisig, Hagendorf, & van der Meer, 2011;Sleegers, Proulx, & Van Beest, 2015). Sleegers et al (2015) have shown, for example, that repeated presentations of reverse-colored playing cards (e.g., black two of hearts) lead to a sustained and consistent increase in pupil dilation across dozens of trials.…”

“…If the initial response to cues of ostracism is indeed primarily a violation of expectations, we should see an increase in pupil dilation in response to these cues. This is based on the research showing the pupil unilaterally dilates following cognitive conflict induced by a variety of expectancy violations, such as task error and perceptual discrepancies (e.g., Brown et al, 1999;Critchley et al, 2005;Preuschoff et al, 2011;Raisig et al, 2010;Raisig et al, 2011;Sleegers et al, 2015). Since it takes some time to realize one is being excluded during a game of Cyberball, we can additionally predict that this increase in pupil dilation appears gradually, once it is clear that each ball toss not received is indeed a signal of being ostracized.…”

Eyes as Windows to Minds: Psycholinguistics for Experimental Philosophy

“…By contrast, where new text violates expectations and clashes with the conclusions of schema-based inferences, suppression is required and costs effort (Faust and Gernsbacher 1996). Accordingly, pupillometry has documented dilations in response to violations of scripts (social event/action schemas) (Raisig et al 2012). 10 Our study used pupillometry to garner evidence ofinappropriatestereotypical inferences supported by event schemas.…”