When do auditory/visual differences in duration judgements occur?

Abstract

Four experiments examined judgements of the duration of auditory and visual stimuli. Two used a bisection method, and two used verbal estimation. Auditory/visual differences were found when durations of auditory and visual stimuli were explicitly compared and when durations from both modalities were mixed in partition bisection. Differences in verbal estimation were also found both when people received a single modality and when they received both. In all cases, the auditory stimuli appeared longer than the visual stimuli, and the effect was greater at longer stimulus durations, consistent with a "pacemaker speed" interpretation of the effect. Results suggested that Penney, Gibbon, and Meck's (2000) "memory mixing" account of auditory/visual differences in duration judgements, while correct in some circumstances, was incomplete, and that in some cases people were basing their judgements on some preexisting temporal standard.

Single-Modality Memory Mixing in Temporal Generalization: An Effect Due to Instructional Ambiguity

“…Whereas in recent studies cross-modal comparisons between presented time intervals and some stored standard intervals revealed the mixing effect (cf. Penney, et al, 2000;Klapproth, 2004;Wearden, et al, 2006), a similar effect could be shown in this experiment, when two standards were slightly different in duration and were presented within the visual modality.…”

“…Klapproth concluded that "the instruction regarding the putative difference of the standards prevented a mutual shift of the gradients and therefore memory mixing" (Klapproth, 2004, p. 429). The latter result resembled that one recently obtained from Wearden, Todd, and Jones (2006). In their first experiment, a mixedmodality bisection task was used in which the modality of the stimuli was segregated into four distinct blocks.…”

Is approximate numerical judgment truly modality-independent? Visual, auditory, and cross-modal comparisons

“…In time-related tasks, such as duration and empty-interval judgments, differences in precision and accuracy occur between visual and auditory stimuli (see Grondin, 2010, for a review): Auditory signals are perceived as being longer than visual signals of the same duration (e.g., Walker & Scott, 1981;Wearden, Todd, & Jones, 2006), and sensitivity to time is much higher (i.e., lower threshold, or less variability) when intervals are marked by auditory rather than visual signals (Grondin, 2003). It has been hypothesized that the rate of the pacemaker might differ between auditory and visual stimuli in such a way that the internal clock runs faster for auditory than for visual stimuli, and that this "clock speed" difference is the main source of differences in subjective duration across modalities (e.g., Penney et al, 2000;Ulrich, Nitschke, & Rammsayer, 2006).…”

New Perspectives on Vierordt’s Law: Memory-Mixing in Ordinal Temporal Comparison Tasks

“…As a source of this bimodality effect, differences in either clock speed or in the probability of closure of an attentional switch have been used to account for the findings [11,[25][26][27]. In the case of the clock speed account, auditory signals are presumed to drive the pacemaker or oscillatory processes used as the time base for temporal discriminations faster than visual signals, thereby creating proportional differences between the clock readings for physically identical durations.…”