Time Order as Psychological Bias
Laetitia Grabot, Virginie van Wassenhove
Psychological Science · 2017 · Volume 28 · Issue 5
Abstract
Incorrectly perceiving the chronology of events can fundamentally alter people’s understanding of the causal structure of the world. For example, when astronomers used the “eye and ear” method to locate stars, they showed systematic interindividual errors. In the current study, we showed that temporal-order perception may be considered a psychological bias that attention can modulate but not fully eradicate. According to Titchener’s law of prior entry, attention prioritizes the perception of an event and thus can help compensate for possible interindividual differences in the perceived timing of an event by normalizing perception in time. In a longitudinal study, we tested the stability of participants’ temporal-order perception across and within sensory modalities, together with the magnitude of the participants’ prior-entry effect. All measurements showed the persistence of stable interindividual variability. Crucially, the magnitude of the prior-entry effect was insufficient to compensate for interindividual variability: Conscious time order was systematically subjective, and therefore traceable on an individual basis.
Keywords
temporal order, interindividual variability, multisensory, attention, time consciousness, open data
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.