Bausenhart Karin M, Dyjas Oliver, Ulrich Rolf
University of Tübingen, Germany.
University of Tübingen, Germany.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2014 Mar;147:60-7. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2013.06.011. Epub 2013 Jul 26.
Several findings from duration perception literature suggest that when making decisions about time, participants rely on an internal reference memory for time rather than merely on the current physical stimuli. According to a recent account, such an internal reference is formed by a continuous dynamic updating process that integrates duration information from previous trials and the current trial. In the present work, we show how such a dynamic mechanism can account for the classical yet unresolved Vierordt effect, which refers to the overestimation of relatively short and the underestimation of relatively long temporal intervals. We conducted an experiment to examine this and related predictions by means of a temporal reproduction task. Specifically, participants were presented with two successive time intervals - a standard s with constant duration and a comparison c with variable duration. Instead of performing a comparison judgment, however, the participants were subsequently cued to reproduce one of the two presented stimuli. Reproductions were affected not only by the temporal position of the to-be-reproduced stimulus, but also by the stimuli presented on earlier trials. These results support the notion of a dynamically updated internal reference underlying our judgments about the time elapsed, which might also be the basis of the Vierordt effect.
关于时长感知文献的多项研究结果表明，在对时间做出决策时，参与者依赖的是内部时间参考记忆，而非仅仅依赖当前的物理刺激。根据最近的一种说法，这种内部参考是由一个持续的动态更新过程形成的，该过程整合了来自先前试验和当前试验的时长信息。在本研究中，我们展示了这样一种动态机制如何解释经典但尚未解决的菲奥尔特效应，该效应指的是对相对较短的时间间隔高估，而对相对较长的时间间隔低估。我们进行了一项实验，通过时间复制任务来检验这一点及相关预测。具体而言，向参与者呈现两个连续的时间间隔——一个时长恒定的标准刺激s和一个时长可变的比较刺激c。然而，参与者随后并未进行比较判断，而是被提示复制呈现的两个刺激之一。复制不仅受到待复制刺激的时间位置影响，还受到早期试验中呈现的刺激影响。这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即我们对过去时间的判断背后存在一个动态更新的内部参考，这也可能是菲奥尔特效应的基础。
