Figure 1.
Cognitive processes involved in time perception.
First, a stimulus duration is encoded and then kept in memory. Next, the comparator retrieves the remembered duration with which the newly encoded duration (i.e., the duration being reproduced in a reproduction task or a target duration in a comparison task) is compared. The comparator stops the reproduction when the reproduced duration is similar enough to the remembered duration, or makes a comparison judgment based on the relative amounts of time between the remembered duration and the target duration in a comparison task.
Table 1.
Differences in experimental parameters among the experiments.
Figure 2.
A schematic illustration of a trial in Experiments 1 and 2 (adapted from Chang et al. [2]).
The dot was green in the experiments. Later experiments used the same or similar trial procedures. Experiment 3 differed from Experiment 2 only in having a 1000 ms blank interval between the offset of the green dot and the onset of “NOW” and having a digit reproduction task after time reproduction. Experiment 4a used the same trial procedure as in Experiment 1 and Experiment 4b and 5 used the same trial procedure as in Experiment 2.
Figure 3.
Results for Experiments 1 and 2.
In Experiment 1, reproduced durations increased as a function of stimulus duration (A) and numerical magnitude (C, left); in Experiment 2 reproduced durations increased as a function of stimulus duration (B) but did not differ for small and large magnitude digits (C, right). Error bars show SEs based on the by-participant analysis (respectively 17 and 28 participants in Experiment 1 and 2).
Figure 4.
Results for Experiment 3.
Reproduced durations increased as a function of stimulus duration (A) but did not differ for small and large magnitude digits (B). Error bars show SEs based on the by-participant analysis (33 participants in total).
Figure 5.
Results for Experiment 4a, 4b, and 5.
In Experiment 4a, reproduced durations increased as a function of stimulus duration (A) and as a function of numerical magnitude (B). In both Experiments 4b and 5, reproduced durations increased as a function of stimulus duration (C, E) but not as a function of numerical magnitude (D, F). Error bars show SEs based on the by-participant analysis (20 participants in Experiment 4a,b and 26 participants in Experiment 5).