Encoding, storage and judgment of experienced frequency and duration (original) (raw)
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Effects of stimulus familiarity upon judged visual duration
Perception & Psychophysics, 1975
Five experiments investigated the influence of the differences in stimulus familiarity among a dot-matrix letter, word, and nonword upon the relative judged duration of 30-msec flashes. ground contrast was manipulated by varying the number of dots comprising each display letter. With 30-msec presentations, judgments ranked subjective durations of the displays nonword > word> letter. Differences in judged duration among stimulus fortns were greater when both forward and backward masking reduced recognition probability to chance level than when no mask was employed, and discriminations among masked presentations were easier for subjects. ground contrast influenced apparent duration judgments only as increases in figure-ground contrast contributed to clarity of familiarity differences among displays. The data were interpreted to indicate that differences in stimulus familiarity operate as early in visual processing as do differences in figure-ground contrast, with greater familiarity facilitating an automatic contact between a stimulus and its memory representation and therein reducing experienced duration.
Relative judgments affect assessments of stimulus duration
Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2008
Humans were trained on two independent temporal discriminations, with correct choice dependent on the initial stimulus duration. In Experiment 1, the durations were 1.0 and 4.0 sec, with one set of choice stimuli, and 2.0 and 8.0 sec, with a different set of choice stimuli. The 2.0-and 4.0-sec values were selected to be the geometric mean of the two values in the other discrimination. In Experiment 2, the durations were 2.0 and 5.0 sec for one discrimination and 3.5 and 6.5 sec for the other. The 3.5-and 5.0-sec values were selected to be the arithmetic mean of the two values in the other discrimination. In both experiments, participants showed evidence for relational coding of the duration pairs. That is, the test durations were selected to be at the presumed bisection point (i.e., they should have produced indifferent choice), but instead the shorter test duration from the longer duration pair produced a "short" bias (in both experiments), whereas the longer duration from the shorter duration pair produced a "long" bias (in the second experiment). Results were similar to those from Zentall, Weaver, and Clement with pigeons.
Duration sensitivity depends on stimulus familiarity.
2009
Abstract 1. When people are asked to assess or compare the value of experienced or hypothetical events, one of the most intriguing observations is their apparent insensitivity to event duration. The authors propose that duration insensitivity occurs when stimuli are evaluated in isolation because they typically lack comparison information. People should be able to evaluate the duration of stimuli in isolation, however, when stimuli are familiar and evoke comparison information.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1994
We describe a theory of memory for visual material in which the visual system acts as a linear filter operating on a stimulus to produce a function, a(t), relating some sensory response to t (the time since stimulus onset). Stimulus information is acquired at a rate proportional to the product of the magnitude by which a(t) exceeds some threshold, and the amount of as-yet-unacquired information. Recall performance is assumed to equal the proportion of acquired information. The theory accounts for data from 2 digit-recall experiments in which stimulus temporal waveform was manipulated. We comment on the theory's account of the relation between 2 perceptual events: the phenomenological experience of the stimulus, and the memory representation that accrues from stimulus presentation. We assert that these 2 events, although influenced by different variables, can be viewed as resulting from 2 characteristics of the same sensory-response function.
Instructional Ambiguity in the Discrimination of and Memory for the Duration of a Stimulus
2006
The study of timing in animals has often included instructional ambiguity (or a failure to discriminate), an artifact that has often led to the misinterpretation of results. In the case of the peak procedure, used to determine when animals anticipate the time of reinforcement, the effect of gaps in the to-be-timed stimulus depends importantly on whether the gap appears similar in appearance to the intertrial interval. When the two intervals are similar animals appear to reset their clock ‐as they learned to do between trials. When the two intervals are different the animals appear to pause their clock. In the case of conditional duration discriminations, memory for the durations appears to shorten with the passage of time since their occurrence as indicted by divergent retention intervals, but only when the retention interval is similar to the intertrial interval and the trial appears to occur without a sample. When the retention interval and the intertrial interval are different, p...
Judgements of the Duration of Auditory and Visual Stimuli
Timing & Time Perception, 2021
Studies of judgements of the durations of filled auditory and visual stimuli were reviewed, and some previously unpublished data were analysed. Data supported several conclusions. Firstly, auditory stimuli have longer subjective durations than visual ones, with visual stimuli commonly being judged as having 80–90% of the duration of auditory ones. Secondly, the effect was multiplicative, with the auditory/visual difference increasing as the intervals became longer. Only a small number of exceptions to both these conclusions were found. Thirdly, differences in variability between judgements of auditory and visual stimuli derived from most procedures were small and sometimes not statistically significant, although differences almost always involved visual stimuli producing more variable judgements. Currently, the most viable explanation of the effects appears to be some sort of pacemaker-counter model with higher pacemaker speed for auditory stimuli, although this approach cannot, in ...
Effects of repetition and exposure duration on memory
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1970
Four experiments used the same basic design; 5s were presented visually with a series of words which varied both in frequency of repetition (F) and in exposure duration (D). Four levels of F (1, 2, 3, and 5 repetitions) were combined orthogonally with five levels of D (2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sec.) in such a way that a repeated word always occurred for the same duration. Dependent variables were: judgment of frequency (JOF), judgment of duration (JOD), recognition performance, and free recall. JOF, recognition, and free recall were highly correlated with F, but relatively unaffected by D. JOD, in contrast, was affected by both F and D, showing that D does have an effect on memory. An interpretation that is consistent with the results is that JOF is based on the strength of the long-term memory trace, while JOD is based partly on strength and partly on an independent dimension of the trace related to D. The total-time hypothesis does not appear to hold when D is manipulated within lists.
Episodic accumulator models of memory assume the archives of memory contain a comprehensive record of past experiences that retains the identity of individual episodes, thereby allowing selective access to memory from different time periods and multiple dimensions of coding. Strength models, in contrast, assume a continuous accumulation of information that merges new information with information from prior earlier episodes to produce an undifferentiated record of past experience. Eight experiments used a multiple cycle, observation-test paradigm to examine these contrasting views of memory for event frequency when frequency is accumulated across lists, rather than within a single list. The results consistently supported the view that strength plays a role in frequency judgments, whether for proper names, common nouns, or pseudo-words. Frequency estimates were impaired for items shifted in event frequency from one cycle to the next; they were directly related to actual cumulative frequency; and, most importantly, they were higher for items repeated across observation cycles than for items presented only in one cycle. Data from a list interpolation manipulation also suggested that frequency information is very persistent. Overall, the results suggest that in addition to episodic memory for individualized episodes, there is an obligatory accumulation of information with little or no contextual compartmentalization, as expected from strength models of memory.
Training Enhances the Interference of Numerosity on Duration Judgement
2013
The interference of magnitudes in different dimensions has been demonstrated previously, but the effect of training in one dimension on judgment of another has yet to be examined. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of training in numerosity judgment on judgment of duration. 32 participants took part in two sessions, 12 days apart, and had to judge which of two successive sets of items was presented longer. Half of the participants (training group) were additionally trained in 11 sessions to judge which one of the two successive sets of items was more numerous. It was found that the participants in the training group became more prone to the interference of numerosity on judging duration after training, when compared to the control group. Thus, being trained to more easily perceive the difference in number of items in the two sets affected the perception of duration. On the 3-month follow up session, no effect was found with 20 participants (n = 10 for each group). These findings indicate that the interference of magnitudes in different dimensions can be modulated by training. We discuss that this modulatory effect might be due to neural changes in shared brain regions between interfering magnitudes and/or is mediated by higher levels of perception.
Sensory effects on judgments of short time-intervals
Psychological Research-psychologische Forschung, 1998
Two experiments were conducted to test the effect of nontemporal factors on duration discrimination. In Exp. 1, a forced-choice adaptive procedure with a standard duration of 400 or 800 ms was employed. It was shown that, for both auditory and visual modes, the discrimination is better with empty intervals (a silent period between two brief signals) than with filled intervals (a continuous signal), but only with shorter durations. In a second experiment, where intervals of the same duration range were employed but were presented with a single-stimulus method, discrimination was better with empty than with filled intervals, and this effect applied to both ranges of duration and both sensory modes. In both experiments, discrimination was better in the auditory than in the visual mode. These data are discussed in the context of current models of timing mechanisms.