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Perceived duration of auditory oddballs: test of a novel pitch-window hypothesis

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Abstract

Unexpected oddball stimuli embedded within a series of otherwise identical standard stimuli tend to be overestimated in duration. The present study tested a pitch-window explanation of the auditory oddball effect on perceived duration in two experiments. For both experiments, participants listened to isochronous sequences consisting of a series of 400 Hz fixed-duration standard tones with an embedded oddball tone that differed in pitch and judged whether the variable-duration oddball was shorter or longer than the standard. Participants were randomly assigned to either a wide or narrow pitch-window condition, in which an anchor oddball was presented with high likelihood at either a far pitch (850 Hz) or a near pitch (550 Hz), respectively. In both pitch-window conditions, probe oddballs were presented with low likelihood at pitches that were either within or outside the frequency range established by the standard and anchor tones. Identical 700 Hz probe oddballs were perceived to be shorter in duration in the wide pitch-window condition than in the narrow pitch-window condition (Experiments 1 and 2), even when matching the overall frequency range of oddballs across conditions (Experiment 2). Results support the proposed pitch-window hypothesis, but are inconsistent with both enhanced processing and predictive coding accounts of the oddball effect.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Elisa Kim Fromboluti & J. Devin McAuley

Authors
  1. Elisa Kim Fromboluti
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  2. J. Devin McAuley
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Correspondence to J. Devin McAuley.

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All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Point-of-subjective-equality (PSE) estimates in milliseconds for Experiment 1 and 2 comparing the z-transform method (based on individual vs. aggregate psychometric curves), probit analysis using maximum-likelihood estimation (IBM Corp. Released 2017. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 25.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.), and the trimmed Spearman–Karber method (Hamilton, Russo, & Thurston, 1977, 1978; Miller & Ulrich, 2004; Stone, 2015) corresponding to columns labeled Z-Ind, Z-Agg, Probit and TSK, respectively. The different psychophysical methods yielded similar PSE estimates and the same general pattern across conditions.

Oddball type

Pitch window

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Z-Ind

Z-Agg

Probit

TSK

Z-Ind

Z-Agg

Probit

TSK

Anchor

Wide

353.9

351.7

349.4

346.6

350.2

350.4

349.3

349.3

Narrow

348.4

349.8

348.1

347.3

357.7

356.6

356. 2

358.9

Critical probe

Wide

363.6

363.6

362.4

359.8

363.0

362.3

361.8

363.9

Narrow

341.3

343.9

342.1

340.5

346.6

346.6

345.5

347.3

Secondary probe

Wide

–

–

–

–

393.0

385.2

385.2

387.1

Narrow

–

–

–

–

346.1

347.3

346.1

346.1

Appendix 2

Mean relative just-noticeable differences (JNDs), expressed as a percentage, as a function of oddball type and pitch window for Experiment 1 (left column) and Experiment 2 (right column). Standard deviations are shown in parentheses.

Oddball type

Pitch window

Relative JND %

  

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Anchor

Wide

8.7 (3.9)

8.5 (3.3)

Narrow

8.4 (4.1)

12.2 (8.4)

Critical probe

Wide

9.9 (3.1)

9.7 (3.4)

Narrow

8.3 (2.3)

10.2 (3.4)

Secondary probe

Wide

–

11.9 (3.8)

Narrow

–

10.1 (3.2)

Relative JND estimates shown here are based on full data set for anchors and probes. JNDs in the 75% likelihood (anchor oddball) condition were also estimated by randomly sampling observations so that the number of sampled observations matched the number of observations in the 25% likelihood (Experiment 1—critical probe oddball) or 12.5% (Experiment 2—critical and secondary probe oddball) conditions to eliminate potential estimation biases associated with differences in the number of observations across conditions (e.g., Hautus, 1995). Estimates of JNDs for anchor oddballs using matched number of observations were similar to estimates based on the full data set

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Fromboluti, E.K., McAuley, J.D. Perceived duration of auditory oddballs: test of a novel pitch-window hypothesis. Psychological Research 84, 915–931 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1124-2

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