Conceptualization and measurement of temporal focus: The subjective experience of the past,present, and future

Temporal focus is the attention individuals devote to thinking about the past, present, and future, and the concept is important because it affects how people incorporate perceptions about past experiences, current situations, and future expectations into their attitudes, cognitions, and behavior. However, temporal focus has not been clearly defined nor situated in a nomological network of constructs. In addition, existing measures of temporal focus suffer from various shortcomings. In this paper, we advance the concept of temporal focus by critically examining its conceptualization, developing a new measure of temporal focus (Temporal Focus Scale; TFS), and evaluating the validity (i.e., construct, convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity) of the TFS across four studies. We conclude that understanding how individuals focus their attention toward the past, present, and future clarifies their responses to explicit and implicit temporal information, which suggests that a variety of research streams would benefit from incorporating the concept of temporal focus.     

Self processing in the brain: A paradigmatic fMRI case study with a professional singer

Understanding the mechanisms involved in perception and conception of oneself is a fundamental psychological topic with high relevance for psychiatric and neurological issues, and it is one of the great challenges in neuroscientific research. The paradigmatic single-case study presented here aimed to investigate different components of self- and other-processes and to elucidate corresponding neurobiological underpinnings. An eminent professional opera singer with profound performance experience has undergone functional magnetic resonance imaging and was exposed to excerpts of Mozart arias, sung by herself or another singer. The results indicate a distinction between self- and other conditions in cortical midline structures, differentially involved in self-related and self-referential processing. This lends further support to the assumption of cortical midline structures being involved in the neural processing of self-specific stimuli and also confirms the power of single case studies as a research tool.     

PTSD青少年对威胁图片注意偏向的时程特点及习惯化倾向

探讨创伤后应激障碍(post-traumatic stress disorder,PTSD)青少年(n=20)与创伤控制组(n=20)对威胁图片注意偏向的时间进程特点以及习惯化倾向.在线索提示任务中,图片的呈现时间为100ms、500ms和1250ms.研究表明:(1)在时间进程上,当图片呈现100ms时,创伤控制组对地震图存在注意警觉;当呈现时间为500ms时,两组被试对负性图和地震图存在注意回避;当呈现时间为1250ms时,PTSD组对负性图仍存在注意回避、对地震图的注意偏向消失,创伤控制组对负性图和地震图的注意偏向均消失.(2)在习惯化倾向上,当第六次呈现威胁图片时,PTSD组对负性图和地震图的注意偏向消失,而创伤控制组对负性图和地震图的注意回避仍未消失.     

事件提示和时间提示对新异干扰的影响—— 来自听视跨通道和听通道的证据

采用Oddball范式考察听视跨感觉通道和听感觉通道中“无关刺激”或“无关属性”的信号提示对新异干扰的影响。实验1和实验2分别比较了听视跨通道和听通道中时间事件提示、时间提示和事件提示三种条件。结果表明：(1)时间提示条件下新异干扰效应消失, 而事件提示条件下新异干扰效应仍存在。无关刺激意外变化引起的靶任务行为受损, 不仅与偏差刺激的小概率和新颖性有关, 而且与干扰刺激与靶子间提示信号关联有关, 这种提示关联中事件发生的提示功能比时间间隔的提示功能更为重要。(2)听通道下新异干扰与视听跨通道结果一致, 无关属性也会起到提示信号作用, 同样事件提示功能比时间提示功能更重要。     

Experiences extended across time: Evaluation of moments and episodes

Intuitions relating to outcomes extended over time are examined. Utility integration is proposed as a normative rule for the evaluation of extended episodes. In Experiment 1, subjects explicitly compared aversive experiences of varying durations. By several measures, disutility was a marginally decreasing function of episode duration, even for experiences that were thought to become increasingly aversive. This pattern is a qualitative violation of the integration rule. In Experiment 2, subjects made global evaluations of a hypothetical person's aversive experiences, on the basis of a series of subjective ratings of discomfort made at periodic intervals. The results showed an extreme sensitivity to improving or deteriorating trend and a striking neglect of duration. The final moments of an extended episode appear to exert a strong influence on the overall judgment. This leads to violations of monotonicity when adding some moments of moderate pain reduces judgments of global aversiveness.     

6- to 9-Month old infants discriminate vowel durations in variable speech contexts

Discriminating temporal relationships in speech is crucial for speech and language development. However, temporal variation of vowels is difficult to perceive for young infants when it is determined by surrounding speech sounds. Using a familiarization-discrimination paradigm, we show that English-learning 6- to 9-month-olds are capable of discriminating non-native acoustic vowel duration differences that systematically vary with subsequent consonantal durations. Furthermore, temporal regularity of stimulus presentation potentially makes the task easier for infants. These findings show that young infants can process fine-grained temporal aspects of speech sounds, a capacity that lays the foundation for building a phonological system of their ambient language(s).     

Measuring sport fantasy proneness and deflated reality in sport and performance: Development and validation of two context-specific instruments

Fantasy-prone personalities and generalized states of pessimism and hopelessness have been linked to various behavioural, cognitive, and health related outcomes in the general population. Nevertheless, to date, knowledge of sport-specific fantasy proneness and athletes’ perception of deflated reality in sport is scarce, possibly due to a lack of appropriate psychometric instruments to examine these two important context-specific constructs. In this research, we developed the Sport Fantasy Proneness Scale (SFPS) and the Deflated Reality in Sport Scale (DRSS), first assessing the content validity of items for the instruments following a rigorous process. Through two cross-sectional samples (Study 1: Sample 1 N = 255, Sample 2 N = 260) and one longitudinal sample (Study 2: Sample 3 N = 118) of competitive athletes in the UK, we then examined factorial, convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity and measurement invariance (Study 1), as well as internal consistency, and test-retest reliability (Study 2) of the two new scales. Results revealed robust construct validity and reliability of scores on the two instruments and suggested very good invariance when implementing the new scales to athletes from different sports and competitive levels and good invariance for cross-gender comparisons. The new scales fill a gap in the sport psychology literature and provide researchers and practitioners with robust psychometric instruments to examine new research questions and tackle issues relevant to athletes’ sport-specific fantasy proneness and perceptions of deflated reality.     

A timing-specific memory distortion effect in young children

It has been suggested that there are systematic distortions in children's memory for temporal durations, such that children's memory is not just less accurate than that of adults but qualitatively different. Experiment 1 replicated the memory distortion effect by demonstrating developmental change in the tendency to confuse a reference duration with one that is shorter rather than longer than it. When the long-term memory demands of the task were reduced by providing reminders of the reference duration on every trial, there were no such qualitative changes in error patterns (Experiment 2). Further evidence for developmental changes in memory distortion was found in the temporal generalization task of Experiment 3, in which stimuli were spaced logarithmically rather than linearly. In Experiment 4, a similar distortion pattern was absent in a task in which children made judgments about the pitch rather than the duration of stimuli, suggesting the effect may be specific to time estimation.     

Timing is everything: Changes in presentation rate have opposite effects on auditory and visual implicit statistical learning

Implicit statistical learning (ISL) is exclusive to neither a particular sensory modality nor a single domain of processing. Even so, differences in perceptual processing may substantially affect learning across modalities. In three experiments, statistically equivalent auditory and visual familiarizations were presented under different timing conditions that either facilitated or disrupted temporal processing (fast or slow presentation rates). We find an interaction of rate and modality of presentation: At fast rates, auditory ISL was superior to visual. However, at slow presentation rates, the opposite pattern of results was found: Visual ISL was superior to auditory. Thus, we find that changes to presentation rate differentially affect ISL across sensory modalities. Additional experiments confirmed that this modality-specific effect was not due to cross-modal interference or attentional manipulations. These findings suggest that ISL is rooted in modality-specific, perceptually based processes.     

Perception of Happening: How the Brain Deals with the No-History Problem

In physics, the temporal dimension has units of infinitesimally brief duration. Given this, how is it possible to perceive things, such as motion, music, and vibrotactile stimulation, that involve extension across many units of time? To address this problem, it is proposed that there is what is termed an “information construct of happening” (ICOH), a simultaneous representation of recent, temporally differentiated perceptual information on the millisecond time scale. The main features of the ICOH are (i) time marking, semantic labeling of all information in the ICOH with ordinal temporal information and distance from what is informationally identified as the present moment, (ii) vector informational features that specify kind, direction, and rate of change for every feature in a percept, and (iii) connectives, information relating vector informational features at adjacent temporal locations in the ICOH. The ICOH integrates products of perceptual processing with recent historical information in sensory memory on the subsecond time scale. Perceptual information about happening in informational sensory memory is encoded in semantic form that preserves connected semantic trails of vector and timing information. The basic properties of the ICOH must be supported by a general and widespread timing mechanism that generates ordinal and interval timing information and it is suggested that state-dependent networks may suffice for that purpose. Happening, therefore, is perceived at a moment and is constituted by an information structure of connected recent historical information.