Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology最新文献

In recent years, there has been growing interest in how we perceive dyadic interactions between people. It has been proposed that pairs of individuals shown upright and face-to-face recruit a form of configural processing, similar to that engaged by upright faces. This processing is thought to aid the detection and interpretation of social interactions. Dyadic arrangements shown back-to-back or upside-down are not thought to engage configural dyad processing. One of the key advantages conveyed by configural face processing is greater sensitivity to the spatial relationships between facial features when faces are viewed upright, than when viewed upside-down. If upright dyads arranged face-to-face engage similar configural processing that is not engaged by non-facing or inverted dyads, participants should therefore exhibit disproportionate sensitivity to the spatial relations between the constituent actors under these conditions. In four well-powered experiments, we find no evidence for this prediction: Participants exhibited similar levels of sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance regardless of whether dyads were shown upright or inverted, face-to-face, or back-to-back. In contrast, we observe clear evidence that upright presentation affords greater sensitivity to interfeature spatial relationships (interocular distance) when viewing faces. These results suggest that any configural processing engaged by upright facing dyads likely differs qualitatively from that engaged by upright faces.

Recent studies have shown that articulatory rehearsal prevents false memories in working memory tasks in young adults. During ageing, a substantial increase in false memories has been documented in numerous studies. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of rehearsal in the increase of false memories with age. In two experiments, we manipulated the opportunity to use rehearsal in a Brown-Peterson task in which younger (n = 80) and older (n = 70) adults maintained semantically related word lists and reported their maintenance strategies. Both experiments showed that reducing the opportunity to use rehearsal increased false memories and decreased correct recall in both groups. Furthermore, older adults made more false memories and less correct recall than younger adults, and these effects were partially mediated by the number of times participants reported using rehearsal (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that age-related differences in rehearsal use explain differences in working memory task performance.

When asked to judge the duration of a face people typically overestimate the duration of angry compared with neutral faces. A novel feature of the current research was the inclusion of secondary manipulations designed to distort timing performance namely the effects of visual cues (Experiment 1) and action preparedness (Experiment 2). Furthermore, to establish whether the effects are multiplicative with duration, the effects were examined across two duration ranges (200-800 and 400-1,600 ms). Visual cues and instructions to prepare to act increased the tendency to judge faces as lasting longer. Experiment 1 revealed an unexpected underestimation effect for angry faces presented for short durations (200-800 ms). However, the effect was not replicated in Experiment 2 where the results were generally consistent with either an increase the speed of a pacemaker mechanism that resides within an internal clock or the widening of an attentional gate-the temporal overestimation effect for angry faces grew in magnitude from the short to long duration. Experiment 2 also showed that the temporal overestimation for angry faces was reduced in magnitude when participants were asked to prepare to either push or pull a joystick.

It has been proposed that autistic people experience a temporal distortion whereby the temporal binding window of multisensory integration is extended. Research to date has focused on autistic children so whether these differences persist into adulthood remains unknown. In addition, the possibility that the previous observations have arisen from between-group differences in response bias, rather than perceptual differences, has not been addressed. Participants completed simultaneity judgements of audiovisual speech stimuli across a range of stimulus-onset asynchronies. Response times and accuracy data were fitted to a drift-diffusion model so that the drift rate (a measure of processing efficiency) and starting point (response bias) could be estimated. In Experiment 1, we tested a sample of non-autistic adults who completed the Autism Quotient questionnaire. Autism Quotient score was not correlated with either drift rate or response bias, nor were there between-group differences when splitting based on the first and third quantiles of scores. In Experiment 2, we compared the performance of autistic with a group of non-autistic adults. There were no between-group differences in either drift rate or starting point. The results of this study do not support the previous suggestion that autistic people have an extended temporal binding window for audiovisual speech. In addition, exploratory analysis revealed that operationalising the temporal binding window in different ways influenced whether a group difference was observed, which is an important consideration for future work.

Public transport disruptions are conducive to disorientation narratives in which the temporal aspects of the experience are central, but it is difficult to collect psychometric data at the moment of disruption to quantify the occurring underlying feelings. We propose a new real-time survey distribution method based on travellers' interaction with disruption announcements on social media. We analyse 456 responses in the Paris area and find that travellers experience time slowing down and their destination feeling temporally farther away when undergoing traffic disruptions. Time dilation is more pronounced for people filling out the survey while still presently experiencing the disruption, suggesting that over time people remember a compressed version of their disorientation. Conflicted time feelings about the disruption, e.g., both faster and slower feelings of the passage of time, appear the longer the recollection delay. Travellers in a stopped train seem to change their itinerary not because the alternative journey feels shorter (it does not), but because it makes time pass faster. Time distortions are phenomenological hallmarks of public transport disruptions, but these distortions are poor predictors of confusion per se. Public transport operators can alleviate the time dilation experienced by their travellers by clearly stating whether they should reorient or wait for recovery when incidents occur. Our real-time survey distribution method can be used for the psychological study of crises, where a timely and targeted distribution is of paramount importance.

Duration estimation is a conceptual ability that plays a crucial role in human behaviour. Impairments in duration estimation ability have a significant impact on daily autonomy and social and cognitive capacities, even more so in psychological disorders. It has been recently shown that the ability to estimate durations develops at a slower pace in individuals with mild intellectual disability (MID) compared with typically developing (TD) individuals. More generally, it has been also demonstrated that duration estimation requires working memory updating. In this study, we compared the duration estimation and updating performances of individuals aged 10-20 years with idiopathic MID without associated disorders to those of typical individuals of the same ages (N = 160). Our results highlight a developmental lag not only in the capacity to estimate short durations (<1 s) in individuals with idiopathic MID, both in a bisection task and in a reproduction task, but also in working memory updating capacity. The findings also emphasise-for the first time-the importance of updating for both the age-related increase in duration estimation capacities and the deficits of these capacities in idiopathic MID. This is consistent with the hypothesis that duration estimation deficits in idiopathic MID may be due, to a large extent, to lower updating abilities.

Music listening affects time perception, with previous studies suggesting that a variety of factors may influence this: musical, individual, and environmental. Two experiments investigated the effect of musical factors (tonality and musical tempo) and individual factors (a listener's level of musical sophistication) on subjective estimates of duration. Participants estimated the duration of different versions of newly composed instrumental music stimuli under retrospective and prospective conditions. Stimuli varied in tempo (90-120 bpm) and tonality (tonal-atonal), in a 2 × 2 factorial design, while other musical parameters remained constant. Estimates were made using written estimates of minutes and seconds in Experiment 1, and the reproduction method in Experiment 2. Two-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) showed no main effect of tonality on estimates and no significant interactions between tempo and tonality, under any condition. Musical tempo significantly affected estimates, with the faster tempo leading to longer estimates, but only in the prospective condition, and with the use of the reproduction method. Correlation matrices using the Pearson correlation coefficient found no correlation between musical sophistication scores (measured using the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index [Gold-MSI]) and verbal or reproduction estimates. In conclusion, together with the existing literature, findings suggest that (1) changes in tonality, without further changes in rhythm, metre, or melodic contour, do not significantly affect estimates; (2) small changes in musical tempo influence only prospective reproduction estimates, with larger tempo differences or longer stimuli being needed to cause changes in retrospective estimates; (3) participants' level of musical sophistication does not impact estimates of musical duration; and (4) empirical research on music listening and subjective time must consider potential method-dependent results.

Consciousness requires subjective experience in the "now." Establishing "now," however, necessitates temporal processing. In the current article, we review one method of altering consciousness, anaesthetic drug administration, and its effects on perceived duration. We searched PubMed, PsycInfo, and ScienceDirect databases, and article reference sections, for combinations of anaesthetic drugs and time perception tasks, finding a total of 36 articles which met our inclusion criteria. We categorised these articles with regard to whether they altered the felt passage of time, short or long interval timing, or were motor timing tasks. We found that various drugs alter the perceived passage of time; ketamine makes time subjectively slow down while GABAergic drugs make time subjectively speed up. At a short interval there is little established evidence of a shift in time perception, though temporal estimates appear more variable. Similarly, when asked to use time to optimise responses (i.e., in motor timing tasks), various anaesthetic agents make timing more variable. Longer durations are estimated as lasting longer than their objective duration, though there is some variation across articles in this regard. We conclude by proposing further experiments to examine time perception under altered states of consciousness and ask whether it is possible to perceive the passage of time of events which do not necessarily reach the level of conscious perception. The variety of methods used raises the need for more systematic investigations of time perception under anaesthesia. We encourage future investigations into the overlap of consciousness and time perception to advance both fields.

The perception of time is a subjective experience influenced by various factors such as individual psychology, external stimuli, and personal experiences, and it is often assessed with the use of the reproduction task that involves individuals estimating and reproducing the duration of specific time intervals. In the current study, we examined the ability of 97 musically trained participants to reproduce the durations of temporal intervals that were filled with music or speech stimuli. The results revealed a consistent pattern of durations being underestimated, and an association was observed between the duration of musical training and the level of accuracy in reproducing both music and speech tracks. In addition, speech tracks were overall reproduced more accurately, and as longer, than music tracks. Structural models suggested the presence of two, highly correlated, dimensions of time perception for speech and music stimuli that were related to the duration of musical training, but not with self-reported rhythm perception. The possible effects of arousal and pleasantness of stimuli on time perception are discussed within the framework of an internal clock model.