Humans integrate duration information across sensory modalities: Evidence for an amodal internal reference of time.

Abstract

Perception is driven not only by current stimulation but also by previous sensory experience, which may serve as a perceptual prior for stimulus processing. A possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon is formalized in the internal reference model, which assumes that humans rely on an internal reference that updates continuously by integrating past and present stimulus representations. As a direct consequence of this process, discrimination sensitivity is higher when a constant standard precedes rather than follows a variable comparison in two-alternative forced-choice tasks. The present study exploited this Type B effect in order to examine whether an internal reference can be formed across stimuli varying within and across modalities. In a series of four experiments, task-irrelevant and/or taskrelevant features either remained constant or varied from trial to trial. In duration discrimination, the Type B effect as a proxy of perceptual prior formation was not affected by variation of pitch or modality. However, in intensity discrimination, it was considerably reduced when stimulus modality and thus also the task-relevant feature (i.e., brightness and loudness) alternated rather than remained constant. These results indicate that temporal information can be isolated from stimulus-specific features and integrated across subsequent trials into a perceptual prior for stimulus judgment, whereas intensity information from different modalities seems to hamper this process. In general, our findings contribute to a growing body of research aimed at understanding the formation and content of perceptual priors.

Modality-specific Sensory and Decisional Carryover Effects in Duration Perception

“…Accordingly, subsequent studies with the temporal discrimination task showed that temporal central tendency effects did not transfer between vision and audition (Rhodes et al, 2018;Zimmermann & Cicchini, In contrast to these findings, Ellinghaus et al (2021) found evidence for an amodal reference of time in the two-interval duration comparison task. Specifically, they found a comparable influence of order (whether the standard or comparison stimulus came first) on discrimination sensitivity, even when the modalities were alternating.…”

“…Several studies investigated whether priors for duration perception generalize across different contexts, but the results are inconclusive (Ellinghaus, Giel, Ulrich, & Bausenhart, 2021;Roach, Mcgraw, Whitaker, & Heron, 2017;Rhodes, Seth, & Roseboom, 2018;Zimmermann & Cicchini, 2020). Roach et al, (2017) found that the central tendency in duration reproduction can be explained by a single prior across distinct sensory signals (from different modalities and spatial locations).…”

Bayesian sense of time in biological and artificial brains

“…This points to the existence of a single dynamic representation of prior information in the brain that is responsible for both types of biases. Corroborating this view, Ellinghaus et al (2021) recently showed evidence indicating that a general dynamic prior for duration judgements integrates temporal information from different sensory modalities.…”

“…Finally, in all cases, cues can involve individual sensory modalities (e.g. visual or auditory) or a combination of more than one (Ellinghaus et al 2021).…”

Modal and Amodal Cognition: An Overarching Principle in Various Domains of Psychology

“…Despite this, people can also compare information across modalities. For instance, people can compare the duration of a tone to the duration of light and vice versa (e.g., Bratzke & Ulrich, 2019;Ellinghaus et al, 2021). They can even compare the brightness of a visual stimulus to the loudness of a tone and vice versa (Heller, 2021;Stevens & Marks, 1965).…”