Abstract
Human visual system processes information efficiently by selectively allocating attention to the information that is related to one’s goal, inhibiting the irrelevant information at the same time. Studies investigating selective visual information processing often focus on space and/or features of the stimuli, however, how we inhibit irrelevant information in temporal domain remains unclear. In the present study, we examined characteristics of duration perception of a target with the presence of irrelevant information. In the experiment, distractor stimuli and a target stimulus were presented on a CRT monitor with various durations. A cue was briefly presented to indicate the location of the target stimulus, followed by presentations of the target and distractors. Subjects were instructed to reproduce the duration of the target by pressing a button while ignoring the distractors’ durations. The target duration was either 450, 600, or 750 msec. The number of distractors was either 0, 3, 6, 9, or 11. The durations of the distractors were sampled from uniform distributions whose ranges were 0.8 – 1.2 times that of the target duration. In the analysis, we calculated the mean and the coefficient of variations (C.V.) of the reproduced durations. The results indicated that subjects accurately reproduced the target durations, regardless the number of distractors. On the other hand, C.V. monotonically increased as the number of distractors increased. These results suggest that irrelevant information interferes with duration perception by adding noise to the target representation. We will further discuss the mechanisms of duration perception and how interference occurs during the encoding of durations.
Acknowledgement: KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas) 17K18693 KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Resarch (B))16H03749