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21 On the Flexibility of Human Temporal Resolution Agnieszka Wykowska and Valtteri Arstila Our ability to efficiently interact with the environment is to a large extent dependent on how exact we are in perceiving the world’s temporal properties. Imagine a situation in which one is to cross a busy street. Such an environment requires a temporal resolution down to the milliseconds range to be able to estimate the speed of an approaching car and its distance relative to one’s position. The same holds for, say, a soccer player, who needs not only to estimate the speed of the to-be-kicked ball but also the speed of the player who is supposed to receive the ball. These and other similar scenarios show that we live in a fast-paced world in which good temporal resolution plays a fundamental role for adaptive behavior. 21.1 What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Human Temporal Resolution? For artificial systems, one can talk about sampling rates or pixels per square inch. Similarly, one can investigate the resolution of the human information processing system—the ability to perceive (and/or report) two distinct stimuli as separate. By the same token, human temporal resolution might be understood as the ability to perceive two events occurring at the same time as simultaneous, and two events occurring with a delay as asynchronous. The window of simultaneity—the time range within which two asynchronous stimuli are still perceived as a single event—is how temporal resolution might be operationalized, given the above way of understanding temporal resolution. As various research results have shown, the human window of simultaneity is far from being precise. For example, the window of simultaneity for visual stimuli can be in the range of 20–30 ms, depending on circumstances. That is, two distinct visual events occurring with a small delay might be fused and seen as simultaneous (Pöppel, 1988, 1997). Temporal resolution, understood as the ability to detect two stimuli presented with a delay as asynchronous, has been commonly investigated using so-called simultaneity judgment (SJ) tasks (e.g., Bushara, Grafman, & Hallett, 2001; Raizada & Poldrack, 2001; Santangelo & Spence, 2008; Stone et al., 2001) or temporal-order judgment (TOJ) tasks (e.g., Bald et al., 1942; Hirsh & Sherrick, 1961; Jaśkowski, 1993; McDonald et al., 2005; Shore, Spence & Klein, 2001). In the SJ tasks, two stimuli are presented either simultaneously or with a 432 Agnieszka Wykowska and Valtteri Arstila variable delay, and participants are asked to judge whether the stimuli were presented at the same time or asynchronously. In the TOJ tasks, two stimuli are presented with variable stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA), and participants are asked to make a judgment concerning which of the stimuli was presented first. According to Ernst Pöppel (e.g., Pöppel, 1988, 1997), the SJ tasks target perceptual processes that are simpler and hierarchically subordinate to those pinpointed by the TOJ task. It is indeed the case that SJ requires observers to perceive two events as separate, whereas TOJ requires something more: first of all, perception of distinct events, and second, perception of their order. In support of such a thesis, Pöppel (1988) described findings indicating that the threshold for simultaneity judgments varies between modalities, being at around 30 ms for the visual modality and around 4 ms for the auditory (when the two clicks are presented to different ears). Still, the time needed for making correct judgments about temporal order is about the same across all modalities: 30 ms (Hirsh & Sherrick, 1961). Therefore, even if auditory events are already perceived as separate and not fused into one, observers might not be able to determine their order of occurrence. This implies not only that different systems might be involved in those two different tasks, but also that the systems involved in the simultaneity judgment are modality-specific, whereas the system involved in temporal-order judgments must be supramodal and, according to Pöppel, central. It seems that human temporal resolution, as measured by the window of simultaneity, is a bit sluggish. Is human temporal resolution that varies across modalities still constant and fixed for each of the modalities? Or perhaps the window of simultaneity can be narrowed? Several authors have investigated how such factors as attentional focus (e.g., Correa, Lupiáñez & Tudela, 2005; Shore et al., 2001; Santangelo & Spence, 2008; Yeshurun & Levy, 2003; Hein, Rolke, Ulrich, 2006; Rolke, 2008; Rolke et al., 2008); task set (e.g., Zampini, Shore, and Spence, 2003); or...

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