Does Preference for Abstract Patterns Relate to Information Processing and Perceived Duration?

Repetitive prestimulation, in the form of click trains, is known to alter a wide range of cognitive and perceptual judgments. To date, no research has explored whether click trains also influence subjective preferences. This is plausible because preference is related to perceptual fluency and clicks may increase fluency, or, because preference is related to arousal and clicks may increase arousal. In Experiment 1, participants heard a click train, white noise, or silence through headphones and then saw an abstract symmetrical pattern on the screen for 0.5, 1, or 1.5 s. They rated the pattern on a 7-point scale. Click trains had no effect on preference ratings, although patterns that lasted longer were preferred. In Experiment 2, we again presented a click train, silence, or white noise but included both symmetrical and random patterns. Participants made both a duration and a preference judgment on every trial. Auditory click trains increased perceived duration, and symmetrical patterns were perceived as lasting longer than random patterns. Again there was no effect of auditory click trains on preference, and again patterns that were presented for longer were preferred. We conclude that click trains alter perceptual and cognitive processes, but not preferences. This helps clarify the nature of the click train effect and shows which predictions implicit in the existing literature are supported

Time Changes with the Embodiment of Another’s Body Posture

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the perception of presentation durations of pictures of different body postures was distorted as function of the embodied movement that originally produced these postures. Participants were presented with two pictures, one with a low-arousal body posture judged to require no movement and the other with a high-arousal body posture judged to require considerable movement. In a temporal bisection task with two ranges of standard durations (0.4/1.6 s and 2/8 s), the participants had to judge whether the presentation duration of each of the pictures was more similar to the short or to the long standard duration. The results showed that the duration was judged longer for the posture requiring more movement than for the posture requiring less movement. However the magnitude of this overestimation was relatively greater for the range of short durations than for that of longer durations. Further analyses suggest that this lengthening effect was mediated by an arousal effect of limited duration on the speed of the internal clock system

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

Human reproductions of time intervals are often biased towards 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 ready-set-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

Increased temporal sensitivity for threat: A Bayesian generalized linear mixed modeling approach.

People overestimate the duration of threat-related facial expressions, and this effect increases with self-reported fearfulness (Tipples in Emotion, 8, 127-131, 2008, Emotion, 11, 74-80, 2011). One explanation (Cheng, Tipples, Narayanan, & Meck in Timing and Time Perception, 4, 99-122, 2016) for this effect is that emotion increases the rate at which temporal information accumulates. Here I tested whether increased overestimation for threat-related facial expressions in high fearfulness generalizes to pictures of threatening animals. A further goal was to illustrate the use of Bayesian generalized linear mixed modeling (GLMM) to gain more accurate estimates of temporal performance, including estimates of temporal sensitivity. Participants (N = 53) completed a temporal bisection task in which they judged the presentation duration for pictures of threatening animals (poised to attack) and nonthreatening animals. People overestimated the duration of threatening animals, and the effect increased with self-reported fearfulness. In support of increased accumulation of pacemaker ticks due to threat, temporal sensitivity was higher for threat than for nonthreat images. Analyses indicated that temporal sensitivity effects may have been absent in previous research because of the method used to calculate the index of temporal sensitivity. The benefits of using Bayesian GLMM are highlighted, and researchers are encouraged to use this method as the first option for analyzing temporal bisection data

Using time perception to explore implicit sensitivity to emotional stimuli in autism spectrum disorder

Establishing whether implicit responses to emotional cues are intact in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is fundamental to ascertaining why their emotional understanding is compromised. We used a temporal bisection task to assess for responsiveness to face and wildlife images that varied in emotional salience. There were no significant differences between an adult ASD and comparison group, with both showing implicit overestimation of emotional stimuli. Further, there was no correlation between overestimation of emotional stimuli and autistic traits in undergraduate students. These data do not suggest a fundamental insensitivity to the arousing content of emotional images in ASD, or in individuals with a high degree of autistic traits. The findings have implications for understanding how emotional stimuli are processed in ASD

Temporal Accumulation and Decision Processes in the Duration Bisection Task Revealed by Contingent Negative Variation

The duration bisection paradigm is a classic task used to examine how humans and other animals perceive time. Typically, participants first learn short and long anchor durations and are subsequently asked to classify probe durations as closer to the short or long anchor duration. However, the specific representations of time and the decision rules applied in this task remain the subject of debate. For example, researchers have questioned whether participants actually use representations of the short and long anchor durations in the decision process rather than merely a response threshold that is derived from those anchor durations. Electroencephalographic (EEG) measures, like the contingent negative variation (CNV), can provide information about the perceptual and cognitive processes that occur between the onset of the timing stimulus and the motor response. The CNV has been implicated as an electrophysiological marker of interval timing processes such as temporal accumulation, representation of the target duration, and the decision that the target duration has been attained. We used the CNV to investigate which durations are involved in the bisection categorization decision. The CNV increased in amplitude up to the value of the short anchor, remained at a constant level until about the geometric mean (GM) of the short and long anchors, and then began to resolve. These results suggest that the short anchor and the GM of the short and long anchors are critical target durations used in the bisection categorization decision process. In addition, larger mean N1P2 amplitude differences were associated with larger amplitude CNVs, which may reflect the participant’s precision in initiating timing on each trial across a test session. Overall, the results demonstrate the value of using scalp-recorded EEG to address basic questions about interval timing

Activity in perceptual classification networks as a basis for human subjective time perception

Despite being a fundamental dimension of experience, how the human brain generates the perception of time remains unknown. Here, we provide a novel explanation for how human time perception might be accomplished, based on non-temporal perceptual classification processes. To demonstrate this proposal, we build an artificial neural system centred on a feed-forward image classification network, functionally similar to human visual processing. In this system, input videos of natural scenes drive changes in network activation, and accumulation of salient changes in activation are used to estimate duration. Estimates produced by this system match human reports made about the same videos, replicating key qualitative biases, including differentiating between scenes of walking around a busy city or sitting in a cafe or office. Our approach provides a working model of duration perception from stimulus to estimation and presents a new direction for examining the foundations of this central aspect of human experience

Group membership and racial bias modulate the temporal estimation of in-group/out-group body movements

Social group categorization has been mainly studied in relation to ownership manipulations involving highly-salient multisensory cues. Here, we propose a novel paradigm that can implicitly activate the embodiment process in the presence of group affiliation information, whilst participants complete a task irrelevant to social categorization. Ethnically White participants watched videos of White- and Black-skinned models writing a proverb. The writing was interrupted 7, 4 or 1 s before completion. Participants were tasked with estimating the residual duration following interruption. A video showing only hand kinematic traces acted as a control condition. Residual duration estimates for out-group and control videos were significantly lower than those for in-group videos only for the longest duration. Moreover, stronger implicit racial bias was negatively correlated to estimates of residual duration for out-group videos. The underestimation bias for the out-group condition might be mediated by implicit embodiment, affective and attentional processes, and finalized to a rapid out-group categorization