Speeding up a master clock common to time, number and length?

doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2010.06.017

Behavioural Processes

Volume 85, Issue 2, October 2010, Pages 126-134

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2010.06.017 Get rights and content

Abstract

The present study investigated the effect of a click train on the bisection of time, number and length when each modality was presented sequentially and non-sequentially. For the bisection of time, the results showed that the clicks shifted the bisection function toward the left and decreased the bisection point (point of subjective equality), thus suggesting that the stimulus duration was judged longer with than without clicks, and this is both in the sequential and the non-sequential condition. For the bisection of number and length, the click train again produced a leftward shift of the bisection function with the result that the number was judged greater and the line longer with than without clicks, but only when the number and the length were presented sequentially. This suggests that the click-related lengthening effect is not due to speeding up of an internal clock specifically devoted to the processing of time, but rather to an effect acting on an accumulator process that is commonly mobilized when judging the magnitude of quantities presented sequentially.

Section snippets

Participants

180 students at Blaise Pascal University (118 women and 62 men) (mean age = 20.59, SD = 3.35) participated in this experiment in return for a payment of 10 euros.

Material

The participants sat in a quiet room in front of a Macintosh computer which controlled all the experimental events via PsyScope. The participants gave their responses by pressing two keys on the computer keyboard (k, d). The auditory clicks were 12 ms in length and were emitted at a frequency of 500 Hz tone at intervals of 200 ms (onset to

Time bisection

Fig. 2 shows the mean proportion of long responses (p(long) plotted against the stimulus value for the click and the no-click trials in the two anchor stimulus conditions, when the participants had to judge the duration of an event or a sequence of events. An examination of this figure reveals that the click train shifted the bisection function toward the left, in line with the results found in most timing experiments that have used clicks. To analyze this click-related leftward shift of the

Discussion

The study presented here shows that the bisection of both continuous and discontinuous quantities such as time, number and length, shares the same scalar properties. First, the judgments of quantities were on average accurate, with the proportion of long/many response increasing with the quantity values. Second, the variability in the representation of quantities, whatever their modality, increased proportionally with the values of the quantities, with the result that the WR remained constant

Acknowledgment

We are grateful to Emmanuelle Neuville and Pires Jaos for their help during the collection of some of the data and to Alain Meot for her statistical advice for the revision of this manuscript.

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This further highlights the impact that the sequential nature of duration-based sequences has on the ability to process order. In fact, research on children and adults has revealed that acuity for number and size is better than for duration when numerical and size stimulation is presented simultaneously, but these differences in processing disappear when stimuli are presented sequentially (Droit-Volet, Clément, & Fayol, 2008; see also Dormal & Pesenti, 2013; Droit-Volet, 2010). Along these lines, a goal for future research could be to establish whether differences in ordinal processing between number and size on the one hand, and time on the other hand, can be accounted for by the very nature of stimuli presentation, simultaneous vs. sequential, for example by presenting 4-month-old infants with size and/or numerical sequences in which, as in the case of temporal items, magnitude information carried by each numerical/size item accumulates over time, so that some time needs to elapse before each item’s value reaches its peak.
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Speeding up a master clock common to time, number and length?

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Material

Time bisection

Discussion

Acknowledgment

Cognitive Brain Research

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Cognitive Brain Research

Cognitive Brain Research

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Behavioural Processes

Intelligence

Acta Psychologica

Brain and Cognition

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Behavioural Processes

Brain and Cognition

Numerosity discrimination in preschool children

Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Temporal discrimination increases in precision over development and parallels the development of numerosity discrimination

Developmental Science

Timing ability and numerical competence in rats

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes

Oscillator-based memory for serial order

Psychological Review

What makes us tick? Functional and neural mechanisms of interval timing

Nature Neuroscience

Dissociation between activation and attention effects in time estimation: implications for the internal clock models

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Beyond the number domain

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Time, number and length: similarities and differences in bisection behavior in children and adults

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology