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Published August 8, 2017 | Published
Journal Article Open

Triple dissociation of duration perception regulating mechanisms: Top-down attention is inherent

Abstract

The brain constantly adjusts perceived duration based on the recent event history. One such lab phenomenon is subjective time expansion induced in an oddball paradigm ("oddball chronostasis"), where the duration of a distinct item (oddball) appears subjectively longer when embedded in a series of other repeated items (standards). Three hypotheses have been separately proposed but it remains unresolved which or all of them are true: 1) attention prolongs oddball duration, 2) repetition suppression reduces standards duration, and 3) accumulative temporal preparation (anticipation) expedites the perceived item onset so as to lengthen its duration. We thus conducted critical systematic experiments to dissociate the relative contribution of all hypotheses, by orthogonally manipulating sequences types (repeated, ordered, or random) and target serial positions. Participants' task was to judge whether a target lasts shorter or longer than its reference. The main finding was that a random item sequence still elicited significant chronostasis even though each item was odd. That is, simply being a target draws top-down attention and induces chronostasis. In Experiments 1 (digits) and 2 (orientations), top-down attention explained about half of the effect while saliency/adaptation explained the other half. Additionally, for non-repeated (ordered and random) sequence types, a target with later serial position still elicited stronger chronostasis, favoring a temporal preparation over a repetition suppression account. By contrast, in Experiment 3 (colors), top-down attention was likely the sole factor. Consequently, top-down attention is necessary and sometimes sufficient to explain oddball chronostasis; saliency/adaptation and temporal preparation are contingent factors. These critical boundary conditions revealed in our study serve as quantitative constraints for neural models of duration perception.

Additional Information

© 2017 Lin, Shimojo. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: April 6, 2017; Accepted: July 22, 2017; Published: August 8, 2017. Editor: Suliann Ben Hamed, Centre de neuroscience cognitive, FRANCE. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF BCS-1439372) and Japan Science and Technology Agency CREST to SS (principal investigator). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank Daw-An Wu for his input on refining the visual stimuli and comments on the manuscript. Data Availability: Data are available for download at: https://figshare.com/s/734e47ce2541f42bc992. Author Contributions: Conceptualization: Yong-Jun Lin, Shinsuke Shimojo. Data curation: Yong-Jun Lin. Formal analysis: Yong-Jun Lin. Funding acquisition: Shinsuke Shimojo. Investigation: Yong-Jun Lin. Methodology: Yong-Jun Lin, Shinsuke Shimojo. Project administration: Yong-Jun Lin, Shinsuke Shimojo. Resources: Shinsuke Shimojo. Software: Yong-Jun Lin. Supervision: Shinsuke Shimojo. Validation: Yong-Jun Lin. Visualization: Yong-Jun Lin. Writing ± original draft: Yong-Jun Lin. Writing ± review & editing: Yong-Jun Lin, Shinsuke Shimojo. The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 17, 2023