Interference between auditory and visual duration judgements suggests a common code for time

Abstract

Auditory stimuli usually have longer subjective durations than visual ones for the same real duration, although performance on many timing tasks is similar in form with different modalities. One suggestion is that auditory and visual stimuli are initially timed by different mechanisms, but later converted into some common duration code which is amodal. The present study investigated this using a temporal generalization interference paradigm. In test blocks, people decided whether comparison durations were or were not a 400-ms standard on average. Test blocks alternated with interference blocks where durations were systematically shorter or longer than in test blocks, and interference was found, in the direction of the durations in the interference blocks, even when the interfering blocks used stimuli in a different modality from the test block. This provides what may be the first direct experimental evidence for a "common code" for durations initially presented in different modalities at some level of the human timing system.

Visual-auditory differences in duration discrimination of intervals in the subsecond and second range

“…In a most recent series of experiments, however, Salmela et al (2014) provided experimental evidence that working memory resources are shared across representations in the auditory and visual sensory modalities. Thus, working memory can be considered a domain-general resource pool that is shared across modalities which is consistent with the basic assumption of an amodal, cognitive representation of time at a higher level of information processing ( Stauffer et al, 2012 ; Filippopoulos et al, 2013 ).…”

How are overlapping time intervals perceived? Evidence for a weighted sum of segments model

“…In multimodal timing contexts, the way in which time intervals of different modalities are encoded and represented in working memory or the reference memory is still an unresolved issue. The specific context might determine whether the timing system represents time intervals in the same modality as they are presented, in a common 'amodal' code (Filippopoulos, Hallworth, Lee, & Wearden, 2013), or transforms them into the other modality. There is some evidence that temporal information is primarily encoded in the auditory system and that visual temporal structures (rhythms) or intervals are automatically transformed into an auditory representation (crossmodal encoding; Bratzke, Seifried, & Ulrich, 2012;Guttman, Gilroy, & Blake, 2005;Kanai, Lloyd, Bueti, & Walsh, 2011).…”

Visual Timing of Structured Dance Movements Resembles Auditory Rhythm Perception

“…While it seems fitting to explain our visual results borrowing the framework of auditory timing [ 10 ], with beat-based mechanism for discrete movements and duration-based mechanism for continuous ones, given the differences in paradigms and stimuli, we do not imply that these auditory mechanisms can be directly mapped onto visual timing of realistic human movements. Whether these timing modes are indeed supramodal still warrants further investigations [ 2 , 42 ]. Similarly, on the basis of shared perceptual and motor timing processes, our perceptual results (for discrete versus continuous movements) seem reminiscent of the dualistic motor timing in synchronization tasks: discrete movements (e.g., finger-tapping) employ event-based timing, whereas continuous movements (e.g., circle drawing) employ emergent timing [ 43 ].…”