Hallez Quentin, Damsma Atser, Rhodes Darren, van Rijn Hedderik, Droit-Volet Sylvie
University Clermont Auvergne, CNRS, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2019 Jan;192:87-93. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.10.004. Epub 2018 Nov 17.
Human reproductions of time intervals are often biased toward previously perceived durations, resulting in a central tendency effect. The aim of the current study was to compare this effect of temporal context on time reproductions within children and adults. Children aged from 5 to 7 years, as well as adults, performed a ready-set-go reproduction task with a short and a long duration distribution. A central tendency effect was observed both in children and adults, with no age-difference in the effect of global context on temporal performance. However, the analysis of the effect of local context (trial-by-trial) indicated that younger children relied more on the duration (objective duration) presented in the most recent trial than adults. In addition, statistical analyses of the influence on temporal performance of recently reproduced durations by subjects (subjective duration) revealed that temporal reproductions in adults were influenced by performance drifts, i.e., their evaluation of their temporal error, while children simply relied on the value of reproduced durations on the recent trials. We argue that the central tendency effect was larger in young children due to their noisier internal representation of durations: A noisy system led participants to base their estimation on experienced duration rather than on the evaluation of their judgment.
人类对时间间隔的再现往往偏向于先前感知到的持续时间，从而产生一种集中趋势效应。本研究的目的是比较这种时间背景对儿童和成人时间再现的影响。5至7岁的儿童以及成年人进行了一项准备-就绪-开始的再现任务，该任务具有短和长两种持续时间分布。在儿童和成人中均观察到了集中趋势效应，全局背景对时间表现的影响在年龄上没有差异。然而，对局部背景（逐次试验）效应的分析表明，年幼儿童比成年人更依赖最近一次试验中呈现的持续时间（客观持续时间）。此外，对被试最近再现的持续时间（主观持续时间）对时间表现影响的统计分析表明，成年人的时间再现受到表现漂移的影响，即他们对时间误差的评估，而儿童只是简单地依赖于最近试验中再现持续时间的值。我们认为，年幼儿童的集中趋势效应更大，这是因为他们对持续时间的内部表征更嘈杂：一个嘈杂的系统导致参与者基于经历的持续时间而不是基于对自己判断的评估来进行估计。
