Droit-Volet Sylvie, Meck Warren H, Penney Trevor B
Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive, CNRS, UMR 6024, Blaise Pascal University of Clermont-FD, 34 Avenue Carnot, 63000, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
Behav Processes. 2007 Feb 22;74(2):244-50. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2006.09.012. Epub 2006 Nov 2.
This experiment investigated the effect of signal modality on time perception in 5- and 8-year-old children as well as young adults using a duration bisection task in which auditory and visual signals were presented in the same test session and shared common anchor durations. Durations were judged shorter for visual than for auditory signals by all age groups. However, the magnitude of this modality difference was larger in the children than in the adults. Sensitivity to time was also observed to increase with age for both modalities. Taken together, these two observations suggest that the greater modality effect on duration judgments for the children, for whom attentional abilities are considered limited, is the result of visual signals requiring more attentional resources than are needed for the processing of auditory signals. Within the framework of the information-processing model of Scalar Timing Theory, these effects are consistent with a developmental difference in the operation of the "attentional switch" used to transfer pulses from the pacemaker into the accumulator. Specifically, although timing is more automatic for auditory than visual signals in both children and young adults, children have greater difficulty in keeping the switch in the closed state during the timing of visual signals.
本实验通过时长二等分任务，研究了信号模态对5岁、8岁儿童以及年轻成年人时间感知的影响。在该任务中，听觉和视觉信号在同一次测试中呈现，并共享相同的锚定时长。所有年龄组对视觉信号时长的判断均短于对听觉信号时长的判断。然而，这种模态差异的幅度在儿童中比在成年人中更大。同时还观察到，对于这两种模态，时间敏感度均随年龄增长而提高。综合这两个观察结果表明，对于注意力能力被认为有限的儿童而言，视觉信号比听觉信号处理需要更多注意力资源，这导致了模态对时长判断的更大影响。在标量计时理论的信息处理模型框架内，这些效应与用于将脉冲从起搏器传输到累加器的“注意力开关”操作中的发育差异一致。具体而言，尽管在儿童和年轻成年人中，听觉信号的计时比视觉信号更自动化，但儿童在视觉信号计时过程中更难保持开关处于关闭状态。
