Duration perception of visual and auditory oddball stimuli: Does judgment task modulate the temporal oddball effect?

Abstract

The duration of rare stimuli (oddballs) presented within a stream of homogenous standards tends to be overestimated. This temporal oddball effect (OE) has been attributed to perceptual processes. The OE is usually assessed with a comparative judgment task. It has been argued, however, that this task is prone to decision biases. The present experiments employed comparative and equality judgments, since it has been suggested that equality judgments are less vulnerable to such biases. Experiments 1a and 1b used visual stimuli, and Experiment 2 auditory stimuli. The results provide no strong evidence for decision biases influencing the OE. In addition, computational modeling clearly suggests that the equality judgment is not particularly suited to distinguish between perceptual and decisional effects. Taken together, the pattern of the present results is most consistent with a perceptual origin of the OE.

Introducing a control condition in the classic oddball paradigm: Oddballs are overestimated in duration not only because of their oddness

“…Tse et al observed overestimations of the oddballs' duration in the order of 35 %. This basic effect has not only been observed for expanding disks but also for stationary oddballs which only deviated from the standards in shape or color (Birngruber et al 2014a;Chen and Yeh 2009;Schindel et al 2011).…”

“…Tse et al observed overestimations of the oddballs' duration in the order of 35 %. This basic effect has not only been observed for expanding disks but also for stationary oddballs which only deviated from the standards in shape or color (Birngruber et al 2014a;Chen and Yeh 2009;Schindel et al 2011).However, follow-up studies have usually reported distinctly smaller OEs than those reported by Tse et al (2004). In their original study, Tse et al employed comparison durations that were mostly shorter than the standard duration.…”

“…Previous research has indicated that people tend to overestimate the duration of deviant stimuli appearing in a series of repeated standard stimuli (Birngruber et al 2014a;Chen and Yeh 2009;Kim and McAuley 2013;New and Scholl 2009;Pariyadath and Eagleman 2007;Schindel et al 2011; T. Birngruber ( ) · H. Schröter · R. Ulrich University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: teresa.birngruber@uni-tuebingen.de Tse et al 2004). Tse et al first introduced a paradigm that revealed this oddball effect (OE).…”

“…While this modified paradigm allowed the effect of stimulus probability on judged duration to be isolated, the underlying mechanism of this frequency effect might be quite different from that of the classic stream-based OE. Further evidence for the idea that the stream might be processed differently comes from the observation that the size of the OE normally increases with the position of the oddball in the stream (Birngruber et al 2014a;Kim and McAuley 2013;Pariyadath and Eagleman 2012).…”

Temporal discrimination of one’s own reaction times in dual-task performance: Context effects and methodological constraints

“…Indeed, based on his research on pitch and loudness discrimination, Doughty (1949) concluded that this method should not be used for assessing the PSE or the constant error (i.e., standard minus PSE) even though it may be suited to determine the difference threshold. However, the method of constant stimuli has been successfully used to investigate temporal phenomena related to perceived duration, for example, in studies on intentional binding (Nolden, Haering, & Kiesel, 2012), the temporal oddball effect (Birngruber, Schröter, & Ulrich, 2014;Tse, Intriligator, Rivest, & Cavanagh, 2004), the effects of stimulus repetition (Matthews, 2011), or the influence of global temporal contexts (Jones & McAuley, 2005). All these studies used comparison intervals that were symmetrically distributed around the physical standard duration, thereby avoiding a possible asymmetry effect.…”