Subjective present: a window of temporal integration indexed by mismatch negativity

• Published in: Cognitive processing Vol. 16; no. Suppl 1; pp. 131 - 135
• Main Authors: Wang, Lingyan, Lin, Xiaoxiong, Zhou, Bin, Pöppel, Ernst, Bao, Yan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.09.2015
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adolescent; Adult; Artificial Intelligence; Attention - physiology; Behavioral Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Contingent Negative Variation - physiology; Electroencephalography; Evoked Potentials, Auditory - physiology; Female; Frontal Lobe - physiology; Functional Laterality; Humans; Male; Neurosciences; Psychoacoustics; Reaction Time - physiology; Sex Characteristics; Short Report; Time Factors; Young Adult; Subjective present; Temporal window; Mismatch negativity; Gender difference
• ISSN: 1612-4782; 1612-4790
• DOI: 10.1007/s10339-015-0687-8

It has been proposed that temporal perception is implemented in a “time window” of approximately 3 s which we experience as “present”. Using mismatch negativity (MMN), we tested the hypothesis whether a time window of 3 s is selective for pre-attentively detecting the violation of regularity in a stimulus sequence by employing different interstimulus intervals. Our results showed that in frontal midline areas, the amplitudes of MMN were significantly larger for the shorter interstimulus intervals up to 3 s than for the longer ones. In lateralized frontal areas, male subjects seemed to have a stronger effect in the temporal modulation of the MMN, which might deserve further investigation. We conclude that a time window of 3 s is selective for neuronal mechanisms to process deviant stimuli and that information processing is temporally segmented, creating a “subjective present” in discrete sequential steps.