The Capacity Of Simultaneous Temporal Processing Based On The Coding To Different Spatial Locations:an Experiment Research

Time perception is a frontier research topic in Cognitive Psychology. Recently, many studies have supported the idea that time perception in visual modality is closely linked with the encoding of spatial location of objects. A fundamental ability for human is to monitor and process multiple temporal events that occur at different spatial locations simultaneously. A great amount of studies have demonstrated simultaneous temporal processing (STP) in human and animal participants, i.e., multiple ’clocks’ rather than single ’clock’. However, up to date, we still have no knowledge about the exact limitation of the STP in vision. Here we provide the first series experiments to measure this critical mechanism in human vision by using a novel paradigm. The paradigm, named Temporal Oddball-Detection Paradigm (TODP), combines merits of a temporal oddball-detection task and a capacity measurement widely used in the studies of visual working memory to quantify the capacity of STP (CSTP). Our results indicate that the capacity limit of simultaneous temporal processing in vision is around3to4spatial locations. Moreover, the binding of the ’local clock’ and its specific location is undermined by bottom-up competition of spatial attention, indicating that the time-space binding is resource-consuming. Our finding that the capacity of STP is not constrained by the capacity of visual working memory (VWM) supports the idea that the representations of STP are likely stored and operated in units different from those of VWM.