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

Abstract

Three experiments assessed whether participants perceive infrequent stimuli (oddballs) to last longer than frequent ones (standards). The classical oddball paradigm was modified so that participants judged the duration of a target stimulus which could either be a standard or an oddball. The target was always the fifth stimulus in the stream and all stimuli were presented at predefined spatial positions. These modifications enabled a direct comparison of duration judgments for oddballs and standards. In Experiments 1 and 2 not only the duration of oddballs but also the duration of standards was overestimated by virtually the same amount. In other words, the overestimation of oddballs was not due to their oddness but reflected a different temporal dilation such as the negative time-order error. In Experiment 3, all stimuli were presented at the same spatial position. Again, both oddballs and standards were overestimated, however, oddballs more so. The present results highlight the importance of comparing the judged duration of oddballs and standards when evaluating the size of the genuine oddball effect. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the occurrence of temporal oddball effects can depend on spatial features of stimulus presentation. Keywords Time perception · Oddball effect · Stimulus frequencyPrevious 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). In this paradigm, participants were presented a stream of standard stimuli, for example small black disks, in the center of a computer screen. All standard stimuli were presented for a constant standard duration. At random positions within this stream, single oddball stimuli, for example expanding black disks, were presented for varying comparison durations. The participants' task was to judge whether the oddballs were shorter or longer in duration than the standard stimuli. 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. Such an asymmetric arrangement of comparison durations can result in the so-called asymmetry effect (Guilford 1954) and thus artificially inflate the size of the OE. Accordingly, Seifried and Ulrich (2010) ob...

Triple dissociation of duration perception regulating mechanisms: Top-down attention is inherent

“…If researchers were to identify the contributing factors underlying each type of chronostasis, it is beneficial to isolate the top-down attention part first and let it serve as a baseline, such as the role of the random sequence condition in our experiments (c.f. [22]).…”

The influence of stimulus repetition on duration judgments with simple stimuli

“…Finally, we analyzed response times (RTs) (see Birngruber et al, 2015 , for another application of RT analyses in duration judgment tasks). First, we excluded all trials with RTs which were larger than 4000 ms because we considered them outliers (this led to the exclusion of 105 trials which is < 0.6% of all trials).…”

“…This result from the “stream-based” oddball paradigm has mostly been interpreted as a temporal overestimation of oddballs. But since only relative judgments between standards and oddballs are required, it could just as well reflect a temporal underestimation of standards (see Birngruber et al, 2015 , for a study including judgments of standards as well as oddballs).…”

Further Evidence That the Effects of Repetition on Subjective Time Depend on Repetition Probability

“…The oddball task has several drawbacks: the novelty of the oddball is confounded with its position in the sequence, participants are asked to compare a single oddball duration with the duration of many standards on either side of it (such that the decision process is ill specified), and the task confounds novelty on a given trial with the overall probability of occurrence across all trials ( Matthews, 2011 ; Birngruber et al, 2015a ).…”