On the Cognitive principles underlying operational biases in the temporal domain – CoPrOBTeD

Space, time and number are intertwined dimensions at the cognitive and neural level. Recent evidence suggests that numerical and temporal information is projected onto a spatially organized conceptual dimension (i.e. a conceptual space). The Operational Momentum Effect (OME) can be seen as a consequence of the spatial character of the mental magnitude representation. The OME describes the tendency to overestimate the outcome of additions and underestimate the outcome of subtractions.
An analog effect has been described in the temporal domain (Bonato, Fias & Zorzi, 2021). Participants were asked to either combine the temporal duration of two auditory stimuli (addition) or to estimate the temporal difference between them (subtraction). Participants reproduced the estimated duration by holding down a button. Compared to a baseline condition without arithmetic combination, participants overestimated the duration of addition and underestimated the duration of subtraction (Temporal Momentum Effect, TME).
By tackling three theoretic problems, the current project further characterizes the underlying functional principles of the TME in a number of psychophysical experiments with healthy adults:
1. I will probe the functional locus of the effect by isolating the perceptual from the motor component of the information processing.
2. I will test the predictions that can be made according to the sensory integration hypothesis to test whether the observed effects reflect stimulus energy accumulation rather than a cognitive bias.
3. I will test the notion that OME and TME are be positively correlated that can be derived from the hypothesized common underlying mechanisms.
The results will provide important information about the generalizability of the TME and will finally help understand how humans code and operate on temporal information.