Sector of Cognitive Neuroscience, SISSA, Trieste, Italy.
Percept Mot Skills. 2011 Aug;113(1):3-10. doi: 10.2466/04.22.PMS.113.4.3-10.
Spatial attention is a key factor in the exploration and processing of the surrounding environment, and plays a role in linking magnitudes such as space, time, and numbers. The present work evaluates whether shifting the coordinates of spatial attention through rotational head movements may affect the ability to estimate the duration of different time intervals. A computer-based implicit timing task was employed, in which participants were asked to concentrate and report verbally on colour changes of sequential stimuli displayed on a computer screen; subsequently, they were required to reproduce the temporal duration (ranging between 5 and 80 sec.) of the perceived stimuli using the computer keyboard. There was statistically significant overestimation of the 80-sec. intervals exclusively on the rightward rotation head posture, whereas head posture did not affect timing performances on shorter intervals. These findings support the hypothesis that the coordinates of spatial attention influence the ability to process time, consistent with the existence of common cortical metrics of space and time in healthy humans.
空间注意是探索和处理周围环境的关键因素，在连接空间、时间和数字等数量方面发挥作用。本研究评估了通过旋转头部运动来转移空间注意坐标是否会影响估计不同时间间隔持续时间的能力。采用基于计算机的内隐定时任务，要求参与者集中注意力并口头报告计算机屏幕上显示的顺序刺激的颜色变化；然后，他们需要使用计算机键盘再现感知刺激的时间持续时间（在 5 到 80 秒之间）。仅在向右旋转头部姿势时，80 秒间隔的估计存在显著的高估，而头部姿势对较短间隔的计时表现没有影响。这些发现支持了这样一种假设，即空间注意的坐标影响处理时间的能力，这与健康人类中空间和时间的共同皮质度量的存在一致。
