Auditory Rate Perception Displays a Positive Serial Dependence

Abstract

We investigated perceived timing in auditory rate perception using a reproduction task. The study aimed to test (a) whether central tendency occurs in rate perception, as shown for interval timing, and (b) whether rate is perceived independently on each trial or shows a serial dependence, as shown for other perceptual attributes. Participants were well able to indicate perceived rate as reproduced and presented rates were linearly related with a slope that approached unity, although tapping significantly overestimated presented rates. While the slopes approached unity, they were significantly less than 1, indicating a central tendency in which reproduced rates tended towards the mean of the presented range. We tested for serial dependency by seeing if current trial rate reproductions depended on the preceding rate. In two conditions, a positive dependence was observed. A third condition in which participants withheld responses on every second trial produced a negative dependency. These results suggest separate components of serial dependence linked to stimulus and response: Withholding responses reveals a negative perceptual effect, whereas making responses adds a stronger positive effect that is postperceptual and makes the combined effect positive. Together, these data show that auditory rate perception exhibits both central tendency and serial dependence effects.

Serial Dependence in Temporal Perception Reveals the Dynamics of Constructing an Internal Reference Frame

“…For example, in a visual orientation judgment task, the perceptual reports of the current orientation are attracted toward the stimulus of the recent past [20][21][22][23] . Similar effects are observed in other perception tasks 21,[23][24][25][26] like face perception 27,28 and numerosity perception 29,30 . In the temporal domain, the sequential effect has been examined in temporal judgment that a duration will be more likely judged shorter if it is preceded by a short duration 31,32 .…”

“…These observations further motivated us to investigate serial dependence in temporal perception systematically using a temporal reproduction with a set of stimuli randomly sampled from a certain distribution. Indeed, in our temporal reproduction task, we found a nonlinear serial dependence whose pattern is similar to the serial dependence in the visual tasks [23][24][25][26] . Specifically, the current reproduction is biased towards the duration of the previous .…”

Temporal dynamics of implicit memory underlying serial dependence

“…Large opaque dots represent average parameter estimates across participants, small and transparent dots represent individual data, and error bars represent 95% confidence intervals over parameter estimates Shadlen, 2010). Central tendency alone, however, cannot explain the bias caused by the trial speed (Kwon & Knill, 2013;Motala et al, 2020). Given that the serial dependence effect was pronounced even after 8 s, we next asked how stable the memory trace that leads to serial dependence might be.…”

Cartesian coordinates scaffold stable spatial perception over time

“…These two kinds of variables exhibit different relationships between “ relative ” and “ error .” For the circular variable on the φ axis, it is in DoG form ( Manassi et al, 2018 ); the circular variable for orientation in previous studies ( Fischer & Whitney, 2014 ). For the noncircular variables on the x , y , and ρ axes, the relationships are in a linear form as an approximation of the DoG function whereby independent variables are restricted to a range of small values, corresponding with the limited space (e.g., Motala, Zhang, & Alais, 2020 ).…”