Fan Zhao, Jing Guomin, Ding Xianfeng, Cheng Xiaorong
Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Central China Normal University (CCNU), Ministry of EducationWuhan, China; School of Psychology, Central China Normal University (CCNU)Wuhan, China.
Department of Education, Taiyuan Normal University Taiyuan, China.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jan 9;7:2014. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02014. eCollection 2016.
Task-irrelevant stimulus numbers can automatically modulate concurrent temporal tasks--leading to the phenomenon of number-time association (NTA). Recent research provides converging evidence that the NTA occurs at the stage of temporal memory. Specifically, a reference memory containing encoded duration information can be modified by perceptual/concurrent digits, i.e., a perceptual/concurrent digit-induced NTA. Here, with five experiments, we investigated whether another working memory (WM)-related mechanism was involved in the generation of NTAs and how this memory-induced NTA was related with the perception-induced NTA. We first explored whether similar NTA effects existed for mnemonic digits which disappeared before time encoding but were actively maintained in WM, i.e., a mnemonic digit-induced NTA. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated both types of NTAs. Further, we revealed a close relationship between the two types of NTAs in two contexts. First, the mnemonic digit-induced NTA also relied on a perceptual number-time co-occurrence at time encoding. We found that the mnemonic digits influenced subsequent temporal processing when a task-irrelevant constant number '5' was presented during target encoding, but not when a non-numerical symbol was presented, suggesting that temporal representations in the reference memory could be accessed and modified by both sensory and postsensory numerical magnitudes through this number-time co-occurrence. Second, the effects of perceptual and mnemonic digits on temporal reproduction could cancel each other out. A congruency effect for perceptual and mnemonic digits (relying on memorization requirement) was demonstrated in Experiments 4 and 5. Specifically, a typical NTA was observed when the magnitudes of memorized and the perceptual/concurrent digits were congruent (both were large or small numbers), but not when they were incongruent (one small and one large numbers). Taken together, our study sheds new light on the mechanism of NTA.
与任务无关的刺激数字能够自动调节并发的时间任务——从而导致数字-时间关联（NTA）现象。近期研究提供了越来越多的证据表明，NTA发生在时间记忆阶段。具体而言，包含编码时长信息的参照记忆会被感知/并发数字所修改，即感知/并发数字诱发的NTA。在此，我们通过五项实验研究了另一种与工作记忆（WM）相关的机制是否参与了NTA的产生，以及这种记忆诱发的NTA与感知诱发的NTA之间的关系。我们首先探究了对于在时间编码之前消失但在WM中被积极保持的记忆数字，是否存在类似的NTA效应，即记忆数字诱发的NTA。实验1至3证明了这两种类型的NTA。此外，我们在两种情境下揭示了这两种类型NTA之间的紧密关系。首先，记忆数字诱发的NTA在时间编码时同样依赖于感知数字与时间的同时出现。我们发现，当在目标编码期间呈现一个与任务无关的常数“5”时，记忆数字会影响随后的时间处理，但当呈现一个非数字符号时则不会，这表明参照记忆中的时间表征可以通过这种数字-时间同时出现，被感觉和感觉后数字大小所访问和修改。其次，感知数字和记忆数字对时间再现的影响可能会相互抵消。实验4和5证明了感知数字和记忆数字（依赖于记忆要求）的一致性效应。具体而言，当记忆数字和感知/并发数字的大小一致时（均为大数或小数），会观察到典型的NTA，但当它们不一致时（一个小数和一个大数）则不会。综上所述，我们的研究为NTA的机制提供了新的见解。
