The impact of a concurrent motor task on auditory and visual temporal discrimination tasks
Previous studies have shown the presence of an interference effect on temporal perception when participants are required to simultaneously execute a nontemporal task. Such interference likely has an attentional source. In the present work, a temporal discrimination task was performed alone or together with a self-paced finger-tapping task used as concurrent, nontemporal task. Temporal durations were presented in either the visual or the auditory modality, and two standard durations (500 and 1, 500 ms) were used. For each experimental condition, the participant’s threshold was estimated and analyzed. The mean Weber fraction was higher in the visual than in the auditory modality, but only for…
Evidence for a spatial bias in the perception of sequences of brief tones
Listeners are unable to report the physical order of particular sequences of brief tones. This phenomenon of temporal dislocation depends on tone durations and frequencies. The current study empirically shows that it also depends on the spatial location of the tones. Dichotically testing a three-tone sequence showed that the central tone tends to be reported as the first or the last element when it is perceived as part of a left-to-right motion. Since the central-tone dislocation does not occur for right-to-left sequences of the same tones, this indicates that there is a spatial bias in the perception of sequences. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.