Abstract
In order to study the influence of attention on time perception, a strategy is proposed that is a combination of two methods. One method is the sharing of attention between temporal and nontemporal information. The other method is that used to trace a Performance Operating Characteristics (POC) curve; the POC curve serves to investigate the relative cost of concurrent tasks when the subject is asked to allocate different amounts of attention to each of two tasks. The tasks are (1) duration discrimination between two confusable time intervals and (2) loudness discrimination between two confusable auditory intensities. Five different conditions of allocation are manipulated, and two durations are investigated: 500 and 1500 ms. The results suggest: (1) that both the temporal and the nontemporal performances suffer from attention sharing, which decreases the amount of attention to a given task and thus increases the number of discrimination errors; and (2) that when less attention is allocated to the passage of time, the perceived duration seems shorter at 500 ms but not at 1500 ms.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Grondin, S., Macar, F. (1992). Dividing Attention between Temporal and Nontemporal Tasks: A Performance Operating Characteristic -POC- Analysis. In: Macar, F., Pouthas, V., Friedman, W.J. (eds) Time, Action and Cognition. NATO ASI Series, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3536-0_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3536-0_14
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