The effect of visually filled reproductions on the reproduced durations of auditory intervals

Abstract

The present study examined how the perception of time is affected by the presence of a visual stimulus during the reproduction phase of an online time reproduction task. Participants were instructed to reproduce the durations of speed-altered speech snippets with either a picture or a blank screen presented during the reproduction phase. Results showed that fast speeches were reproduced as longer than slow ones, while the reproduced durations of short speeches were closer to the actual durations than were the long speeches. In addition, longer reproduced durations were observed in trials with a picture than in trials with a blank screen. These results provide clear evidence that postencoding information can influence the reproduction of previously encoded temporal intervals and are discussed in the context of attention allocation and its possible influence on an internal clock mechanism. Also, the study provides evidence that online testing is reliable for assessing biases in time perception, at least with time reproduction tasks.