Rapid recalibration of temporal order judgements: Response bias accounts for contradictory results

• Published in: The European journal of neuroscience Vol. 51; no. 7; pp. 1697 - 1710
• Main Authors: Keane, Brendan, Bland, Nicholas S., Matthews, Natasha, Carroll, Timothy J., Wallis, Guy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: France Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.04.2020
• Subjects: Bias; confidence; Decision making; multisensory; Perception; psychophysics; Repetition; Sensory integration; Temporal variations; Visual stimuli; multisensory; psychophysics; confidence; perception
• ISSN: 0953-816X; 1460-9568
• DOI: 10.1111/ejn.14551

Recent history influences subsequent perception, decision‐making and motor behaviours. In this article, we address a discrepancy in the effects of recent sensory history on the perceived timing of auditory and visual stimuli. In the synchrony judgement (SJ) task, similar timing relationships in consecutive trials seem more synchronous (i.e. less like the repeated temporal order). This effect is known as rapid recalibration and is consistent with a negative perceptual aftereffect. Interestingly, the opposite is found in the temporal order judgement (TOJ) task (positive rapid recalibration). We aimed to determine whether a simple bias to repeat judgements on consecutive trials (choice‐repetition bias) could account for the discrepant results in these tasks. Preliminary simulations and analyses indicated that a choice‐repetition bias could produce apparently positive rapid recalibration in the TOJ and not the SJ task. Our first experiment revealed no evidence of rapid recalibration of TOJs, but negative rapid recalibration of associated confidence. This suggests that timing perception was rapidly recalibrated, but that the negative recalibration effect was obfuscated by a positive bias effect. In our second experiment, we experimentally mitigated the choice‐repetition bias effect and found negative rapid recalibration of TOJs. We therefore conclude that timing perception is negatively rapidly recalibrated, and this is observed consistently across timing tasks. These results contribute to a growing body of evidence that indicates multisensory perception is constantly undergoing recalibration, such that perceptual synchrony is maintained. This work also demonstrates that participants’ task responses reflect judgements that are contaminated by independent biases of perception and decision‐making. Participants are biased to repeat their preceding choice, which can produce false evidence of trial‐by‐trial recalibration/adaptation. We statistically removed this bias and found that timing perception rapidly recalibrates such that perceptual synchrony is maintained. These findings imply that neural processes underlying perception and decision‐making are constantly independently changing.