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New Perspectives on Vierordt’s Law: Memory-Mixing in Ordinal Temporal Comparison Tasks

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Multidisciplinary Aspects of Time and Time Perception

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6789))

Abstract

Distortions in temporal memory can occur as a function of differences in signal modalities and/or by the encoding of multiple signal durations associated with different timing tasks into a single memory distribution – an effect referred to as “memory mixing”. Evidence for this type of memory distortion and/or categorization of signal durations as an explanation for changes in temporal context (e.g., duration ranges), as well as for Vierordt’s law (e.g., overestimation of “short” durations and underestimation of “long” durations), can be studied by examining proactive interference effects from the previous trial(s). Moreover, we demonstrate that individual differences in the magnitude of this “memory-mixing” phenomenon are correlated with variation in reaction times for ordinal temporal comparisons as well as with sensitivity to feedback effects in the formation of duration-specific memory distributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Bon-Mi Gu & Warren H. Meck

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  1. Bon-Mi Gu
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  2. Warren H. Meck
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cognitive Systems Research Institute, Fthiotidos 16, 11523, Athens, Greece

    Argiro Vatakis

  2. Dept. of Psychology and IIASS, International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies, Second University of Naples, Vietri sul Mare, SA, Italy

    Anna Esposito

  3. Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athens, Greece

    Maria Giagkou

  4. UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Fred Cummins

  5. Department of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University Campus, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Georgios Papadelis

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Gu, BM., Meck, W.H. (2011). New Perspectives on Vierordt’s Law: Memory-Mixing in Ordinal Temporal Comparison Tasks. In: Vatakis, A., Esposito, A., Giagkou, M., Cummins, F., Papadelis, G. (eds) Multidisciplinary Aspects of Time and Time Perception. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6789. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21478-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21478-3_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21477-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21478-3

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