Mattes S, Ulrich R
University of Wuppertal, Germany.
Percept Psychophys. 1998 Nov;60(8):1305-17. doi: 10.3758/bf03207993.
Stelmach, Herdman, and McNeil (1994) suggested recently that the perceived duration for attended stimuli is shorter than that for unattended ones. In contrast, the attenuation hypothesis (Thomas & Weaver, 1975) suggests the reverse relation between directed attention and perceived duration. We conducted six experiments to test the validity of the two contradictory hypotheses. In all the experiments, attention was directed to one of two possible stimulus sources. Experiments 1 and 2 employed stimulus durations from 70 to 270 msec. A stimulus appeared in either the visual or the auditory modality. Stimuli in the attended modality were rated as longer than stimuli in the unattended modality. Experiment 3 replicated this finding using a different psychophysical procedure. Experiments 4-6 showed that the finding applies not only to stimuli from different sensory modalities but also to stimuli appearing at different locations within the visual field. The results of all six experiments support the assumption that directed attention prolongs the perceived duration of a stimulus.
斯特尔马赫、赫德曼和麦克尼尔（1994）最近提出，被关注刺激的感知持续时间比未被关注刺激的要短。相比之下，衰减假说（托马斯和韦弗，1975）提出了定向注意与感知持续时间之间的相反关系。我们进行了六项实验来检验这两个相互矛盾的假说的有效性。在所有实验中，注意力都指向两个可能的刺激源之一。实验1和实验2采用了70至270毫秒的刺激持续时间。刺激以视觉或听觉形式呈现。被关注形式的刺激被评定为比未被关注形式的刺激持续时间更长。实验3使用不同的心理物理学程序重复了这一发现。实验4至6表明，这一发现不仅适用于来自不同感觉形式的刺激，也适用于出现在视野内不同位置的刺激。所有六项实验的结果都支持这样一种假设，即定向注意会延长刺激的感知持续时间。
