Abstract:

Our experience of time includes two main concepts: succession and duration. The existing research results have shown that there is a repetition priming effect on temporal order judgment and duration estimation respectively. According to the range-synthetic model of temporal cognition, temporal order and duration are inextricably linked as a whole. However, the existing studies have not test the effects of repetition priming on the two important temporal concepts during the same temporal experience. To explore the influences of repetition priming on temporal order perception and interval estimation, the tasks of temporal order judgment and time reproduction were adopted in the present study. Visual targets were composed of pairs of figure stimuli: a square and a diamond. The side length of the targets was 4 cm, and the distance between the stimuli was 9 cm. one of the two stimuli was preceded by a smaller version of itself (a prime) in half of the trials in the primed condition; the side length of the prime was 2 cm. The two visual targets were presented horizontally above or below the center of the screen, and the temporal intervals between the two targets were ±112ms, ±84ms, ±56ms, ±28ms, and 0ms (positive numbers indicated the primed figure preceded the unprimed figure, whereas negative numbers indicated that the unprimed figure appeared first and 0 ms meant the primed figure and unprimed figure appeared simultaneously). If primed, one of the targets was preceded by a repetition prime. The positions of the primed targets were balanced, and each of the two shapes was primed equally often. Eighteen participants were instructed to make the judgments of which target appearing first, and then make estimation of the interval between two targets. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal visual ability, and the data of one participant was deleted due to the random level of temporal order judgments. With 10 repetitions of each of the 72 conditions, the experiment consisted of 720 trials and lasted about 50 min. The results were analyzed by repeated measures ANOVA. During the task of temporal order judgment, the frequency of the judgments of the primed target appearing first was calculated for each SOA and priming condition, and the results showed that there was a significant priming effect that the primed target stimulus was perceived appearing earlier when the non-primed target stimulus appeared first, and there was a reversal of priming effect that the primed target stimulus was perceived appearing later when the primed target stimulus appeared first. During the task of time interval estimation, the lengths between two targets were perceived in the primed condition longer significantly than those between two targets in the non-primed condition. Since the estimated time length was affected by the SOA, the ratio of interval estimation (estimated duration/actual duration) was analyzed and the results showed that the ratio of the primed condition was significantly higher than that of the unprimed condition. In conclusion, there were significant effects of repetition priming on both temporal order perception and interval estimation during the common experience of time, the dual processes of representation activation and response repression induced by the initiation of the primed stimulus was based on the representation matching mechanism in temporal order perception and was based on the arousal mechanism in time interval duration perception, which provided supporting evidence for the theoretical conception of the range-synthetic model of temporal cognition.