Decisional carryover effects in interval timing: Evidence of a generalized response bias

Abstract

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.

Minimal interplay between explicit knowledge, dynamics of learning and temporal expectations in different, complex uni- and multisensory contexts

“…Thus, it is unclear how to handle such responses. Furthermore, there might be trial-dependencies additionally influencing participants duration judgement (Wehrman et al, 2020 ), the stimulus material used for the post hoc test might influence how precise duration judgments are (Ball, Michels, et al, 2018 ) and even for the auditory modality, duration judgements are never perfect (namely, above-chance performance requires duration difference of tens of milliseconds and ceiling performance requires differences of hundreds of milliseconds; see Morrongiello & Trehub, 1987 ). Hence, all these factors would affect participant’s judgement, rendering the responses an unreliable test of explicit knowledge.…”

Serial dependence in time and numerosity perception is dimension-specific

“…The group size was determined a priori using a power analysis based on previous results ( Fornaciai & Park, 2018b ). As serial dependence in duration discrimination has not been tested before (but see Wehrman, Wearden, & Sowman, 2020 , showing a decisional serial effect in a duration bisection task), we based the power analysis on the average effect size observed in numerosity perception across all the experiments included in Fornaciai and Park (2018b) (including only the conditions in which an effect was expected/observed). Based on these data, we estimated an average effect size (Cohen's d ) of about 0.98.…”

Different modality-specific mechanisms mediate perceptual history effects in vision and audition

“…According to this idea, perceptual history would thus operate at the level of perceptual processing, effectively modulating the phenomenological appearance of a stimulus. Alternatively, serial dependence has been interpreted as a more “cognitive” effect, occurring at the level of perceptual decision-making (Pascucci et al, 2019; Wehrman et al, 2020) or during working memory encoding (Bliss et al, 2017; but see Manassi et al, 2018). Although behavioural results suggest that serial dependence is generated at a high-level of the brain processing hierarchy – as shown for instance by its dependence on conscious perception and feedback processing (Fornaciai & Park, 2019a, 2021) – neuroimaging results nevertheless support the idea that perceptual history operates at a relatively low perceptual level.…”

“…Alternatively, the attractive effect has been linked to a higher-level mechanism based on decision-making and memory, depending on the judgment of past stimuli rather than perceptual history per se (e.g., Bliss et al, 2017;Pascucci et al, 2019). Both these frameworks are supported by different findings suggesting that either the attractive effect is perceptual (Cicchini et al, 2017;Fornaciai & Park, 2018a, 2020a or decisional in nature (Pascucci et al, 2019;Wehrman et al, 2020). Overall, there is evidence supporting both the perceptual and cognitive accounts.…”