Abstract
Psychological research has extensively shown that individuals are limited in their ability to process environmental information temporally. In a rapid serial visual presentation, the ability to identify the second of two targets presented in close succession among distractors is usually impaired, a phenomenon known as attentional blink (AB). Paradoxically, when the second target immediately succeeds the first one (lag 1), such an ability is relatively spared, but individuals are more prone to misreport their correct temporal succession. Competitive mechanisms based on prior entry and perceptual integration processes have been suggested to account for the apparent loss of temporal information. We report findings from four experiments, showing that, once identified, categorical dimensions of the stimuli used as targets (here, the ordinality of numbers) may guide the perception and the resulting report of their temporal order. Specifically, at lag 1 individuals more frequently encode the two digits in ascending order. Such a biased regularization may represent another possible outcome of the failure in temporal segregation observed at lag 1, indicating that a mechanism based on prior entry is not generalizable in explaining order reversals. The kind of stimuli chosen as targets in AB paradigms can activate high-level categorical dimensions capable of influencing the performance on this task.
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The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by PZ. The first draft of the manuscript was written by PZ and SS, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Department of Psychology of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy (prot. n. 0000943; date of approval 07/18/2018) and conducted in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments. The manuscript does not report clinical studies or patient data.
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Zivi, P., Ferlazzo, F. & Sdoia, S. Perception of the temporal order of digits during rapid serial visual presentation is influenced by their ordinality. Psychological Research 87, 1537–1548 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01760-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01760-1