Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37240, USA.
Department of Psychology, Sungshin Women's University, Seoul, 02844, Republic of Korea.
Behav Res Methods. 2024 Sep;56(6):5482-5500. doi: 10.3758/s13428-023-02282-3. Epub 2023 Nov 22.
The idea that mental events unfold over time with an intrinsically paced regularity has a long history within experimental psychology, and it has gained traction from the actual measurement of brain rhythms evident in EEG signals recorded from the human brain and from direct recordings of action potentials and local field potentials within the nervous systems of nonhumans. The weak link in this idea, however, is the challenge of extracting signatures of this temporal structure from behavioral measures. Because there is nothing in the seamless stream of conscious awareness that belies rhythmic modulations in sensitivity or mental acuity, one must deploy inferential strategies for extracting evidence for the existence of temporal regularities in neural activity. We have devised a parametric procedure for analysis of temporal structure embedded in behaviorally measured data comprising durations. We confirm that this procedure, dubbed PATS, achieves comparable results to those obtained using spectral analysis, and that it outperforms conventional spectral analysis when analyzing human response time data containing just a few hundred data points per condition. PATS offers an efficient, sensitive means for bridging the gap between oscillations identified neurophysiologically and estimates of rhythmicity embedded within durations measured behaviorally.
时间内心理事件的展开具有内在节奏的观点在实验心理学中有很长的历史，并从脑电信号中记录的大脑节律的实际测量以及从非人类神经系统中的动作电位和局部场电位的直接记录中得到了支持。然而，这个观点的薄弱环节在于从行为测量中提取这种时间结构特征的挑战。因为在意识的无缝流中，没有任何东西可以证明敏感性或思维敏捷性的节律调制，因此必须采用推理策略来提取神经活动中存在时间规律的证据。我们设计了一种分析行为测量数据中包含的时间结构的参数程序，这些数据包括持续时间。我们证实，这种称为 PATS 的程序可以获得与使用频谱分析获得的结果相当的结果，并且当分析每个条件仅包含几百个数据点的人类反应时间数据时，它优于传统的频谱分析。PATS 提供了一种高效、敏感的方法，可以弥合在神经生理学上识别的振荡与在行为上测量的持续时间中嵌入的节奏估计之间的差距。
