Non-magnitude sources of bias on duration judgements for blank intervals: conceptual relatedness of interval markers reduces subjective interval duration.

We report three experiments in which the events flanking a temporal interval were either related or unrelated, based on overlap in the letter identity of single letters (Experiment 1), in the conceptual congruency of color words and colored rectangles (Experiment 2), or in the conceptual congruency of sentence stems and their terminal words (Experiment 3). In all cases, we observed a bias for participants to judge the duration of temporal intervals as shorter when the flanking events were related. We draw an analogy between these temporal judgement distortions and those reported elsewhere (Alards-Tomalin et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 40(2):555-566, 2014) that revealed that the similarity in the relative magnitude of flanking events generate the same type of bias on duration judgements. The observation that non-magnitude dimensions of relatedness between flanking events can also bias duration judgements raise questions about the applicability of two influential theoretical frameworks for understanding the distorting effects that non-temporal stimulus dimensions can have on duration judgments, A Theory of Magnitude (Buetl and Walsh in Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 12:1831-1840, 2009, Walsh in Trends Cogn Sci 7:483-488, 2003) and the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic Books, New York, 1999). In our general discussion, we consider a number of alternative frameworks that may account for these findings.

Constructions on an unwelcome exit: Bruce W. A. Whittlesea, 1950-2018.

On the event of his recent passing, this article provides a personal discussion of Bruce Whittlesea's contributions and career from the perspective of one of his former students. It summarizes the basic tenets of the theoretical framework he developed, the Selective Construction and Preservation of Experience (SCAPE) Account of Memory (Whittlesea, 1997). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Specific and non-specific match effects in negative priming.

The negative priming effect occurs when withholding a response to a stimulus impairs generation of subsequent responding to a same or a related stimulus. Our goal was to use the negative priming procedure to obtain insights about the memory representations generated by ignoring vs. attending/responding to a prime stimulus. Across three experiments we observed that ignoring a prime stimulus tends to generate higher identity-independent, non-specific repetition effects, owing to an overlap in the coarse perceptual form of a prime distractor and a probe target. By contrast, attended repetition effects generate predominantly identity-specific sources of facilitation. We use these findings to advocate for using laboratory phenomena to illustrate general principles that can be of practical use to non-specialists. In the case of the negative priming procedure, we propose that the procedure provides a useful means for investigating attention/memory interactions, even if the specific cause (or causes) of negative priming effects remain unresolved.

The effects of numerical magnitude, size, and color saturation on perceived interval duration.

The relative magnitude (or intensity) of an event can have direct implications on timing estimation. Previous studies have found that greater magnitude stimuli are often reported as longer in duration than lesser magnitudes, including Arabic digits (Xuan, Zhang, He, & Chen, 2007). One explanation for these findings is that different quantitative dimensions (size, intensity, number) are processed and represented according to a common analog magnitude system (Walsh, 2003). In the current study, we examined whether there were commonalities in how people judge the intervals of time occurring between discrete stimuli of different magnitudes across a variety of quantitative dimensions, which included number, size, and color saturation. It was found that duration judgments increased systematically as the overall magnitude difference between sequentially presented stimuli increased. This finding was robust against manipulations to the direction of the sequence, or whether the sequence followed ordered (continuous) or nonordered (discontinuous) pattern trajectories.