Submitted Abstract
The publication (“Temporal decision making in simultaneous timing”) will be part of a special topic volume of the journal “Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience”. The special topic volume is called “Interval Timing and Time-Based Decision Making” which is edited by Warren Meck, one of the most influential researchers on time perception. The publication will also be included in the “Interval Timing” e-book of that journal.The publication summarized results of my research that have in part been presented one year ago in Hong Kong at the “International Cognitive Load Theory Conference”. The presentation of my results at this conference had been funded by the FNR (FNR/10/AM2a/192). The journal within which my findings will be published is an electronic journal that “is focused on the primary questions of how multiple sensory, cognitive and emotional processes merge to produce coordinated complex behavior” (adopted from their website). My publication is about temporal judgments of two stimuli occurring simultaneously. With two experiments it was examined whether one or two clocks operate the timing of two intervals presented simultaneously. The target interval always preceded the distracter interval, and was longer than it. Thus, the distracter was completely embedded within the target interval. The participants used the method of temporal production. The stimuli to be judged differed in modality which allowed for testing the hypothesis of modality-specific internal clocks that operate in parallel and independent from one another when two stimuli were presented at the same time. The main results of this study were as follows. First, production times of the target interval increased proportionally with production times of the distracter interval. Second, the auditory distracter interval was on average produced in less time than the visual distracter interval. Third, a target interval that was accompanied by an auditory distracter interval was on average produced in less time than a target interval that was accompanied by a visual distracter interval. The results obtained support the hypothesis of multiple clocks being involved in the timing of different intervals presented simultaneously (adopted from the abstract).