More laws for pauses: Replication and generalization.

The basic timescales governing animal life are generally determined by body size. Pauses in naturally occurring human speech were investigated to determine if pause timescales are also sensitive to body size. Reported is an analysis of pause duration allometry in recorded interviews of 61 athletes. Pauses were divided into three classes based on whether they occurred during fluid speech or whether they preceded or followed a filled pause (i.e., "um"). Allometric laws relating body size to pause size were found for all three classes-larger people take longer pauses. The derived allometric exponents were used to evaluate a theory of how people experience the passage of time. The theory associates the experience of time passage with the distal flow of time through the mathematics of bounded exponential growth. Nonlinearities inherent in the theory are shown to predict, in detail, the way body size interacts with linguistic context in the deployment of pauses. The theory provides a meaningful framework for understanding how time is experienced as a felt quantity and how pauses are negotiated in everyday speech. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Allometric scaling laws for temporal proximity in perceptual organization.

In both space and time, proximity plays an important role in the formation of perceived groups, objects, and scenes. Proximity is especially critical in the temporal domain where there are constraints-pauses or delays between neighboring events, that when of sufficient size, defeat the grouping processes that underlay temporal integration. A framework is developed where temporal proximity constraints are theorized to reflect lifetimes of exponential decay processes, and this identification leads to an inquiry into their scaling properties. In a study focusing on rhythmic pulse, the slowest tempo permitting stable rhythmic performance is shown to satisfy an allometry with a power-law exponent close to that of heart rate. The coefficient of variation, a measure of drumming stability and precision, is also shown to obey an allometry. A theory is developed that predicts that allometry in the coefficient of variation exists only at adagio and largo tempi. In a second experiment, this theory is tested by replicating the finding of precision allometry at 60 bpm, and by finding that precision is independent of body size at the marching tempo of 120 bpm. A third experiment examined proximity constraints in apparent motion, historically a defining example of temporal organization. Using a behavioral method for measuring path vividness, it is demonstrated that proximity constraints for the percept of illusory motion paths also satisfy an allometry. These two examples of proximity constraint scaling suggest that allometry may be a generic feature of temporal integration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Laws for pauses.

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the observation that these pauses are expressive, they give speech momentum and rhythm, and most importantly, their durations reflect temporal discrimination-they are not produced by articulatory constraints. The theory is formulated in terms of a leaky integrator differential equation that is intended to model the sense of time passage that occurs during relatively brief pauses. The theory predicts that if the decay time scale associated with the leakage term includes body size as a parameter, then allometry will be observed generally in the amount of silence people deploy in pause behavior. A second study tested the theory on a class of long pauses defined by being terminated by a speech gesture indicating speaker recognition that the pause was indeed long. These long pauses were also found to obey allometry. The exponents derived from power law models of mean pause duration in both studies were found to be significantly larger than those associated with allometries of body energy expenditure. These findings provide a new meaning to the embodiment of cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Contraction of time in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been associated with anomalies in dopamine systems. Recent advances in the understanding of the core cognitive deficits in ADHD suggest that dopamine dysfunction might be expressed through shortened time scales in reward-based learning. Here this perspective is extended by the conjecture that temporal span in working memory systems might generally be shortened. As a test of this conjecture the authors focus on the implicit memory system involved in rhythmic movement, assessing the minimum tempo at which rhythmic feeling can be sustained in adults with diagnosed ADHD and in a control group of normal adults. The authors found that people with ADHD do in fact have a rhythm cut-off that is faster in tempo than those without ADHD. This finding is consistent with the idea that impaired dopamine dynamics have systemic consequences for cognitive function, essentially recalibrating the clock that sets the time scale for the subjective experience of temporal events.

Parallel and serial processes in visual search.

A long-standing issue in the study of how people acquire visual information centers around the scheduling and deployment of attentional resources: Is the process serial, or is it parallel? A substantial empirical effort has been dedicated to resolving this issue (e.g., J. M. Wolfe, 1998a, 1998b). However, the results remain largely inconclusive because the methodologies that have historically been used cannot make the necessary distinctions (J. Palmer, 1995; J. T. Townsend, 1972, 1974, 1990). In this article, the authors develop a rigorous procedure for deciding the scheduling problem in visual search by making improvements in both search methodology and data interpretation. The search method, originally used by A. H. C. van der Heijden (1975), generalizes the traditional single-target methodology by permitting multiple targets. Reaction times and error rates from 29 representative search studies were analyzed using Monte Carlo simulation. Parallel and serial models of attention were defined by coupling the appropriate sequential sampling algorithms to realistic constraints on decision making. The authors found that although most searches are conducted by a parallel limited-capacity process, there is a distinguishable search class that is serial.

Provenance of correlations in psychological data.

Two distinct families of statistical processes are considered in the production of psychophysical time series data (Gilden, 1997, 2001; Gilden, Thornton, & Mallon, 1995). We inquire whether the spectral signatures of the underlying dynamics are better described in terms of short-range autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) processes or long-range fractal processes. A thorough presentation of both families is given so as to clarify the scope and generalizability of the models as descriptions of choice reaction time data. Analyses of data are supplemented by the construction of a spectral likelihood classifier that discriminates between the two families of processes. The classifier has sufficient sensitivity to ensure that fractals are correctly identified and that ARMA processes will rarely be misconstrued as belonging to the fractal family. Spectral likelihood classification illustrates an extremely general framework for testing competing spectral hypotheses and is offered for use in measuring the specific character of fluctuations in designed experiments.

Assessing temporal integration spans in ADHD through apparent motion.

OBJECTIVE: We use psychophysical methods to examine the maximum time intervals over which discrete events can be temporally integrated into the percept known as apparent motion. We hypothesized that the maximum time interval would be shorter in participants with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than it would be in a control group. METHOD: Thirty-five adults with ADHD and 40 adult controls without ADHD participated in an apparent motion task, in which they viewed a stimulus flashing in 2 different locations and were asked to complete the trajectory of motion that they perceived. The stimulus flashes were separated by varied temporal intervals ranging from 200 to 2300 ms. Clear trajectory perception in this task indicates successful temporal integration. RESULTS: At short intervals, we found evidence of clear trajectory perception in both groups, indicated by low variability in path estimations. At the longest intervals, neither group demonstrated path perception, evidenced by high variability in estimations. However, at intermediate intervals (1.7 s), the control group demonstrated path perception while the group with ADHD did not, indicating a difference between the 2 groups in the maximum interval over which apparent motion could be perceived. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that ADHD is generally characterized by a contraction in the time scale governing the rate at which association strength decays. In contrast to theories that postulate general time-processing deficits, this work provides a precise sense in which temporality is disturbed in ADHD.

A class of temporal boundaries derived by quantifying the sense of separation.

The perception of moment-to-moment environmental flux as being composed of meaningful events requires that memory processes coordinate with cues that signify beginnings and endings. We have constructed a technique that allows this coordination to be monitored indirectly. This technique works by embedding a sequential priming task into the event under study. Memory and perception must be coordinated to resolve temporal flux into scenes. The implicit memory processes inherent in sequential priming are able to effectively shadow then mirror scene-forming processes. Certain temporal boundaries are found to weaken the strength of irrelevant feature priming, a signal which can then be used in more ambiguous cases to infer how people segment time. Over the course of 13 independent studies, we were able to calibrate the technique and then use it to measure the strength of event segmentation in several instructive contexts that involved both visual and auditory modalities. The signal generated by sequential priming may permit the sense of separation between events to be measured as an extensive psychophysical quantity.

The serial process in visual search.

The conditions for serial search are described. A multiple target search methodology (Thornton & Gilden, 2007) is used to home in on the simplest target/distractor contrast that effectively mandates a serial scheduling of attentional resources. It is found that serial search is required when (a) targets and distractors are mirror twins, and (b) when the search elements lack the Gestalt property of intrinsic orientation. The finding is put into the context of Feature Integration Theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) that first identified the occasions of serial search to be important to object perception and understanding.

Response variability in attention-deficit disorders.

Reaction times in a mental rotation task were measured across a diverse population that sorted into two groupings based on overall variability. Although both the low- and the high-variance groups produced data that displayed the trends typical of mental rotation, the two groups' reaction time sequences had very different autocorrelation functions. Power spectra derived from the two groups' data showed the presence of distinctive noise processes with long memory. Normal levels of variance were associated with 1/f noise, whereas high-variance data had substantial traces of random walk contour. These findings provide new perspectives on cognitive assessments of attention dysfunction.