Differences in perceptual latency estimated from judgments of temporal order, simultaneity and duration are inconsistent

Abstract

Differences in perceptual latency (ΔL) for two stimuli, such as an auditory and a visual stimulus, can be estimated from temporal order judgments (TOJ) and simultaneity judgments (SJ), but previous research has found evidence that ΔL estimated from these tasks do not coincide. Here, using an auditory and a visual stimulus we confirmed this and further show that ΔL as estimated from duration judgments also does not coincide with ΔL estimated from TOJ or SJ. These inconsistencies suggest that each judgment is subject to different processes that bias ΔL in different ways: TOJ might be affected by sensory interactions, a bias associated with the method of single stimuli and an order difficulty bias; SJ by sensory interactions and an asymmetrical criterion bias; duration judgments by an order duration bias.

Keywords: SJ; TOJ; duration; inconsistent; perception; time.

Figure 1.

Temporal order judgments (TOJ). (a) Proportion of V reported before A as a function of the relative timing between A and V. The error bars are the 95% confidence intervals calculated using the Clopper–Pearson method. The four-parameter (mean, standard deviation, lower asymptote and upper asymptote) cumulative normal distributions were fitted using maximum likelihood estimation (Knoblauch & Maloney, 2012). (b) ΔL_VA estimated as the timing for which half of the trials the observer reported V before A in (a). Positive values indicates longer latency for V. The error bars are the 95% parametric bootstrap confidence intervals (Kingdom & Prins, 2010; we use 1,000 samples for all the bootstrap calculations in the paper).

Figure 2.

Simultaneity judgments (SJ). (a) Proportion of simultaneity reports. The error bars are the 95% confidence intervals calculated using the Clopper–Pearson method. The three-parameter (amplitude, mean and standard deviation) normal distributions were fitted using maximum likelihood estimation. (b) ΔLVA estimated as the mean of the fitted distribution in (a). Positive values indicates longer latency for V. The error bars are the 95% bootstrap parametric confidence intervals.

Figure 3.

Duration judgments. (a) Illustration of the two type of trials used. (b) Proportion of trials in which the variable was perceived as lasting longer than the standard for the two types of trials and the two standards. The cumulative normal distributions were fitted using maximum likelihood estimation. (c) Duration variable that matches the standard from (a), PSE. The error bars are the 95% confidence intervals calculated by parametric bootstrap (d) Differences in perceptual latency for auditory and visual stimulation, ΔL_VA, calculated as the difference in the PSEs for the two types of trials in (c) divided by 4 (Equation (4)). Positive values indicates longer latency for V. The error bars are the 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles of the upper and lower limits of the distribution of differences of the bootstrapped PSEs in (c) for the two type of trials divided by 4.

Figure 4.

Replot of the estimated ΔL_VA from Figures 1d, 2b and 3b.