Research On Effects Of Working Memory, Contents On Time Perception

It is suggested that the contents in working memory can change duration perception of visual matching stimuli. It is possible that different kinds of working memory representations may distort visual perception in different ways. In the present study, we associated working memory representations with different attentional tags and then explored their effects on subjective duration. The results showed that: (1)implicit memory representations shortened the subjective duration of that stimuli and duration reproduction is not a sensitive measurement;(2)working memory representations prolonged apparent duration when they were tagged as a target and shortened perceived duration when they were tagged as a distractor. This is the first demonstration that attentional tags can modulate working memory effects on perceptual experience. Our findings are consistent with the ideas that subjective duration is partly based on the magnitude of neural responses. We conclude that the influences of working memory on visual perception are determined not only by what information to be held in working memory, but also by how the information is represented in memory.