Timing affect: Dimension-specific time-based expectancy for affect.

Abstract

Affective information in our environment is often predictable by time; for example, positive answers are typically given faster than negative ones. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, that humans can implicitly adapt to time-based affect predictability. Participants were asked to categorize words, with the words' irrelevant valences being predictable by the timing of their occurrence. Adaptation to this pattern became evident by better performance for typical combinations of time and valence, relative to atypical combinations (Experiment 2). A comparable adaptation was observed for predictable activation (another affective dimension, Experiment 4), but not for predictable imageability (a nonaffective dimension, Experiment 3). In none of the experiments did participants become aware of the time-based predictability. These findings have significant implications for our theoretical understanding of human time-based expectancy, as well as important implications for the scheduling of system delays in artificial interaction and communication environments. (PsycINFO Database Record

Minimal interplay between explicit knowledge, dynamics of learning and temporal expectations in different, complex uni- and multisensory contexts

“…For example, after hearing a knock on the door, it is likely that someone enters the room, but the longer the door stays closed, we start to expect that they did not hear us inviting them in. TBEEs have mainly been investigated with simple visual shapes, coloured numbers, and affective information (Aufschnaiter, Kiesel, Dreisbach, et al, 2018 ; Aufschnaiter, Kiesel, & Thomaschke, 2018 ; Kunchulia et al, 2017 ; Thomaschke et al, 2018 ; Thomaschke & Dreisbach, 2015 ; Thomaschke et al, 2011 ; Volberg & Thomaschke, 2017 ), by, for example, presenting a circle with 80% probability after a short cue–target delay (e.g., 600 ms), while a presentation of a square is 80% probable after a long cue–target delay (e.g., 1400 ms). Note that in these experiments each time point of target occurrence typically has the same likelihood (while they are unevenly distributed in TE studies).…”

Attentional suppression in time and space.

“…The flanker interference was higher when the interval indicated low conflict proportions, which suggests that the interval can act as a contextual cue for attentional interference adjustment. Also, there is evidence that attention can be biased by implicit temporal regularities even when these regularities are uninformative about the target or irrelevant regarding the current task (Thomaschke et al, 2018; Yu & Zhao, 2015; Zhao et al, 2013).…”

Time-based task expectancy: perceptual task indicator expectancy or expectancy of post-perceptual task components?

“…Time-based expectancy is typically induced by correlations between a foreperiod and targets (Thomaschke & Dreisbach, 2013;Volberg & Thomaschke, 2017;Wagener & Hoffmann, 2010). Moreover, time-based expectancy has already been demonstrated in other domains such as visual stimulus perception (Thomaschke et al, 2016), attentional adjustment to conflict contingencies (Wendt, & Kiesel, 2011), language processing (Roberts & Francis, 2013;Roberts et al, 2011;Roberts & Norris, 2016), human-machine interaction (Shahar et al, 2012;Thomaschke & Haering, 2014) or the perception of emotional word valence (Thomaschke et al, 2018). These studies typically examined timebased expectancy in single tasks.…”