Combined effects of motor response, sensory modality, and stimulus intensity on temporal reproduction

Attention and schema violations of real world scenes differentially modulate time perception

In the real world, object arrangement follows a number of rules. Some of the rules pertain to the spatial relations between objects and scenes (i.e., syntactic rules) and others about the contextual relations (i.e., semantic rules). Research has shown that violation of semantic rules influences interval timing with the duration of scenes containing such violations to be overestimated as compared to scenes with no violations. However, no study has yet investigated whether both semantic and syntactic violations can affect timing in the same way. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the effect of scene violations on timing is due to attentional or other cognitive accounts. Using an oddball paradigm and real-world scenes with or without semantic and syntactic violations, we conducted two experiments on whether time dilation will be obtained in the presence of any type of scene violation and the role of attention in any such effect. Our results from Experiment 1 showed that time dilation indeed occurred in the presence of syntactic violations, while time compression was observed for semantic violations. In Experiment 2, we further investigated whether these estimations were driven by attentional accounts, by utilizing a contrast manipulation of the target objects. The results showed that an increased contrast led to duration overestimation for both semantic and syntactic oddballs. Together, our results indicate that scene violations differentially affect timing due to violation processing differences and, moreover, their effect on timing seems to be sensitive to attentional manipulations such as target contrast.

Motion duration is overestimated behind an occluder in action and perception tasks

Motion estimation behind an occluder is a common task in situations like crossing the street or passing another car. People tend to overestimate the duration of an object's motion when it gets occluded for subsecond motion durations. Here, we explored (a) whether this bias depended on the type of interceptive action: discrete keypress versus continuous reach and (b) whether it was present in a perception task without an interceptive action. We used a prediction-motion task and presented a bar moving across the screen with a constant velocity that later became occluded. In the action task, participants stopped the occluded bar when they thought the bar reached the goal position via keypress or reach. They were more likely to stop the bar after it passed the goal position regardless of the action type, suggesting that the duration of occluded motion was overestimated (or its speed was underestimated). In the perception task, where participants judged whether a tone was presented before or after the bar reached the goal position, a similar bias was observed. In both tasks, the bias was near constant across motion durations and directions and grew over trials. We speculate that this robust bias may be due to a temporal illusion, Bayesian slow-motion prior, or the processing of the visible-occluded boundary crossing. Understanding its exact mechanism, the conditions on which it depends, and the relative roles of speed and time perception requires further research.

The Functional Brain Network of Subcortical and Cortical Regions Underlying Time Estimation: An Functional MRI Study

Time estimation is fundamental for human survival. There have been increasing studies suggesting that distributed brain regions, such as the basal ganglia, cerebellum and the parietal cortex, may contribute to a dedicated neural mechanism of time estimation. However, evidence on the specific function of the subcortical and cortical brain regions and the interplay of them is scare. In this work, we explored how the subcortical and cortical networks function in time estimation during a time reproduction task using functional MRI (fMRI). Thirty healthy participants performed the time reproduction task in both auditory and visual modalities. Results showed that time estimation in visual and auditory modality recruited a subcortical-cortical brain network including the left caudate, left cerebellum, and right precuneus. Besides, the superior temporal gyrus (STG) was found essential in the difference between time estimation in visual and auditory modality. Using psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis, we observed an increase in the connection between left caudate and left precuneus using the left caudate as the seed region in temporal reproduction task than control task. This suggested that the left caudate is the key region connecting and transmitting information to other brain regions in the dedicated brain network of time estimation.

Time-to-Collision Estimations in Young Drivers with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may exhibit driving difficulties due to cognitive impairments such as time perception difficulties, a construct related to the perception of time-to-collision (TTC). This study examined the timing abilities of drivers with ASD and ADHD. Sixty participants (n_ADHD = 20, n_ASD = 20, n_TD = 20) completed a time reproduction task and a TTC estimation task in a driving simulator. Results indicated drivers with ASD were less precise in time reproduction across all time intervals and over-reproduced time at shorter intervals. Drivers with ASD produced larger TTC estimates when driving at a faster speed compared to typically developing drivers. Drivers with ASD, but not ADHD, appear to present difficulties in time estimation abilities.

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

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 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.