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A bias generating temporal distortions in serial perception

View ORCID ProfileFranklenin Sierra, David Poeppel, View ORCID ProfileAlessandro Tavano
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.08.463190
Franklenin Sierra
1Department of Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany)
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  • For correspondence: franklenin.sierra@protonmail.com
David Poeppel
1Department of Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany)
2Department of Psychology, New York University (New York City, NY, USA)
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Alessandro Tavano
1Department of Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany)
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Summary

A precise estimation of event timing is essential for survival.1 Yet, temporal distortions are ubiquitous in our daily sensory experience.2 A specific type of temporal distortion is the time order error (TOE), which occurs when estimating the duration of events organized in a series.3 TOEs shrink or dilate objective event duration. Understanding the mechanics of subjective time distortions is fundamental since we perceive events in a series, not in isolation. In previous work,4 we showed that TOEs appear when discriminating small duration differences (20 or 60 ms) between two short events (Standard, S and Comparison, C), but only if the interval between events is shorter than 1 second. TOEs have been variously attributed to sensory desensitization,5,6 reduced temporal attention,7,4 poor sensory weighting of C relative to S,8 or idiosyncratic response bias.6

Surprisingly, the serial dynamics of relative event duration were never considered as a factor generating TOEs. In two experiments we tested them by swapping the order of presentation of S and C. Bayesian hierarchical modelling showed that TOEs emerge when the first event in a series is shorter than the second event, independently of event type (S or C), sensory precision or individual response bias. Participants disproportionately expanded first-position shorter events. Significantly fewer errors were made when the first event was objectively longer, confirming the inference of a strong bias in perceiving ordered event durations. Our finding identifies a hitherto unknown duration-dependent encoding inefficiency in human serial perception.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted October 09, 2021.
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A bias generating temporal distortions in serial perception
Franklenin Sierra, David Poeppel, Alessandro Tavano
bioRxiv 2021.10.08.463190; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.08.463190
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A bias generating temporal distortions in serial perception
Franklenin Sierra, David Poeppel, Alessandro Tavano
bioRxiv 2021.10.08.463190; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.08.463190

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