Department of Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia.
Sci Rep. 2018 Feb 6;8(1):2522. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-20850-y.
The abundance of temporal information in our environment calls for the effective selection and utilization of temporal information that is relevant for our behavior. Here we investigated whether visual attention gates the selective encoding of relevant duration information when multiple sources of duration information are present. We probed the encoding of duration by using a duration-adaptation paradigm. Participants adapted to two concurrently presented streams of stimuli with different durations, while detecting oddballs in one of the streams. We measured the resulting duration after-effect (DAE) and found that the DAE reflects stronger relative adaptation to attended durations, compared to unattended durations. Additionally, we demonstrate that unattended durations do not contribute to the measured DAE. These results suggest that attention plays a crucial role in the selective encoding of duration: attended durations are encoded, while encoding of unattended durations is either weak or absent.
我们所处的环境中存在大量的时间信息，这就要求我们能够有效选择和利用与行为相关的时间信息。在这里，我们研究了当存在多种时长信息源时，视觉注意力是否会选择性地编码相关的时长信息。我们通过时长适应范式来探测时长的编码。参与者在适应两个同时呈现的具有不同时长的刺激流的同时，检测其中一个刺激流中的异常值。我们测量了由此产生的时长后效（DAE），并发现与未注意的时长相比，DAE 反映了对注意时长的相对更强的适应。此外，我们证明未注意的时长不会对所测量的 DAE 产生影响。这些结果表明，注意力在选择性地编码时长方面起着至关重要的作用：注意的时长被编码，而未注意的时长的编码要么很弱，要么不存在。
