Wehrman Jordan J, Wearden John, Sowman Paul
Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, Australia.
Keele University, Newcastle, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2020 May;82(4):2147-2164. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01922-1.
Decisional carryover refers to the tendency to report a current stimulus as being similar to a prior stimulus. In this article, we assess decisional carryover in the context of temporal judgments. Participants performed a temporal bisection task wherein a probe between a long and short reference duration (Experiment 1) was presented on every trial. In Experiment 2, every other trial presented a duration the same as the short or long reference duration. In Experiment 3, we concurrently varied both the size and duration of stimuli. Experiment 1 demonstrated the typical decisional carryover effect in which the current response was assimilated towards the prior response. In Experiment 2, this was not the case. Conversely, in Experiment 2, we demonstrated decisional carryover from the prior probe decision to the reference duration trials, a judgment which should have been relatively easy. In Experiment 3, we found carryover in the judgment of both size and duration, and a tendency towards decisional carryover having a larger effect size when participants were making size judgments. Together, our findings indicate that decisional carryover in duration judgments occur given relatively response-certain trials and that this effect appears to be similar in both size and duration judgments. This suggest that decisional carryover is indeed decisional in nature, rather than due to assimilative effects in perception, and that the difficulty of judging the previous test stimuli may play a role in whether assimilation occurs in the following trial when judging duration.
决策延续是指将当前刺激报告为与先前刺激相似的倾向。在本文中，我们在时间判断的背景下评估决策延续。参与者执行了一项时间二等分任务，其中在每次试验中呈现一个介于长参考持续时间和短参考持续时间之间的探测刺激（实验1）。在实验2中，每隔一次试验呈现与短参考持续时间或长参考持续时间相同的持续时间。在实验3中，我们同时改变了刺激的大小和持续时间。实验1展示了典型的决策延续效应，即当前反应向先前反应同化。在实验2中，情况并非如此。相反，在实验2中，我们证明了从先前的探测决策到参考持续时间试验存在决策延续，而参考持续时间试验的判断本应相对容易。在实验3中，我们在大小和持续时间的判断中都发现了延续，并且当参与者进行大小判断时，决策延续的效应量有更大的趋势。总之，我们的研究结果表明，在相对反应确定的试验中会出现持续时间判断中的决策延续，并且这种效应在大小和持续时间判断中似乎是相似的。这表明决策延续本质上确实是决策性的，而不是由于感知中的同化效应，并且判断先前测试刺激的难度可能在判断持续时间时对下一次试验中是否发生同化起到作用。
