Stimulus expectation prolongs rather than shortens perceived duration: Evidence from self-generated expectations.

Abstract

Previous studies have suggested that unexpected stimuli are perceived as being longer than expected ones (e.g., the temporal oddball effect). These studies manipulated stimulus expectation mostly via stimulus repetitions and stimulus probabilities. However, these manipulations might affect duration judgments not only through the modulation of stimulus expectation. Therefore, the present study introduces a novel paradigm to isolate the effect of stimulus expectation on perceived duration from repetition and probability effects. In 2 experiments, participants vocalized which of 2 possible stimuli they expected in each trial immediately before stimulus presentation (self-generated expectations). Following stimulus presentation, participants performed a temporal bisection task on the duration of the presented stimuli. For both color (Experiment 1) and shape stimuli (Experiment 2), longer perceived durations were observed when stimulus expectations were fulfilled rather than violated. These results contrast with previous studies from which it has been concluded that stimulus expectation shortens perceived duration. Instead, the findings are rather in line with the idea that higher level stimulus expectation enhances stimulus processing and thus prolongs subjective duration (Matthews & Gheorghiu, 2016). Importantly, this also challenges the assumption that higher level stimulus expectation is a key mechanism driving the temporal oddball effect. (PsycINFO Database Record

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

“…A similar conclusion is urged by recent work from Birngruber et al (2017) , which found that explicit expectations about forthcoming stimuli do indeed serve to expand subjective time. These authors asked people to predict the color or shape of stimuli immediately before they were presented; items that matched the prediction were judged to last longer than those that did not.…”

“…Like the results of Matthews (2015) , the current data indicate that the effects of repetition on subjective time are not due to the repeated stimuli being “predicted” or “expected.” Rather, the data suggest that first-order repetition compresses subjective time through some other mechanism, such as low-level sensory adaptation ( Bruno et al, 2010 ; Cai et al, 2015 ), whereas expectation expands subjective duration ( Birngruber et al, 2017 ), perhaps by improving the detection of the stimulus ( Kim and McAuley, 2013 ) or the extraction of information from it ( Matthews, 2015 ).…”

Perceived Duration: The Interplay of Top-Down Attention and Task-Relevant Information

“…The fact that perceived duration is affected by the observer’s expectations about stimuli is of particular interest here; how this phenomenon operates is still an open question. There is existing evidence to suggest that fulfilled expectations reduce (Tse et al, 2004; Ulrich et al, 2006; Pariyadath and Eagleman, 2007, 2012; Matthews, 2011; Schindel et al, 2011), do not reduce (van Wassenhove et al, 2008; Cai et al, 2015), or even increase perceived duration of a stimulus (Matthews’, 2015; Matthews and Gheorghiu, 2016; Matthews and Meck, 2016; Schweitzer et al, 2017; Skylark and Gheorghiu, 2017; Birngruber et al, 2018).…”

“…Moreover, in a classical temporal oddball task, the duration of an unexpected deviant target stimulus (oddball) is overestimated if it is presented randomly within a train of repetitive stimuli with a constant standard duration (Tse et al, 2004; Pariyadath and Eagleman, 2007, 2012; Schindel et al, 2011; Birngruber et al, 2014). This phenomenon has been termed “time’s subjective expansion” (Tse et al, 2004), “oddball chronostasis” (Lin and Shimojo, 2017), or more usually the “temporal oddball effect” (OE; e.g., Pariyadath and Eagleman, 2007, 2012; Schindel et al, 2011; Birngruber et al, 2014, 2018; Matthews and Gheorghiu, 2016). The OE is a robust perceptual phenomenon that persists regardless of the type of temporal task used (e.g., Tse et al, 2004; Matthews, 2011; Birngruber et al, 2014).…”

“…To isolate the effects of stimulus expectations on perceived duration from those of mere repetition and probability, Birngruber et al (2018) used the self-generated expectations paradigm (Bernstein and Reese, 1965). During each trial, participants vocalized their expectations about the color or shape of the target stimulus and then performed a temporal bisection task, categorizing the stimuli as “rather short” or “rather long.” They found that when a target stimulus matched the participant’s self-generated expectation, it was judged to last longer than when it did not.…”