Data_Sheet_1_A matter of time: how musical training affects time perception.PDF

Musical training has been linked to changes in early attentional and perceptual processing. Thus, such an altered attentional and perceptual processing has enabled musicians to judge the duration differently than non-musicians. Although these claims seem intriguing, there are many questions that are not addressed yet, for example, how would the performance of musically-trained differ from that of untrained on visual and auditory temporal judgments? Is there any advantage to musically-trained person in temporal processing? To understand these questions, we thus conducted a series of Auditory and Visual Temporal Bisection Tasks on 32 musically-trained and 32 musically-untrained participants. We hypothesized that if music training modulates general sensitivity to temporal dimensions, then the temporal judgments of musically-trained participants would differ from those of untrained participants in both visual and auditory tasks. Each participant performed a total of 140 trials (70 visual and 70 auditory) in two different blocks. For each participant, a Point of Subjective Equality (PSE) was obtained for visual and auditory conditions. The findings revealed a significant modality effect on time perception, with auditory stimuli being consistently overestimated compared to visual stimuli. Surprisingly, the musically-trained group exhibited a tendency to underestimate duration relative to the musically-untrained participants. Although these results may appear counterintuitive at first glance, a detailed analysis indicates that the length of musical training plays a significant role in modulating temporal processing within the musically-trained group.

音乐训练与早期注意与知觉加工的改变存在显著关联。因此，这种经改变的注意与知觉加工，使得音乐家相较于非音乐家在时长判断上表现出差异。尽管此类研究论断颇具启发性，但仍有诸多关键问题尚未得到解答：例如，受过音乐训练者与未受训练者在视觉与听觉时序判断任务中的表现存在何种差异？受过音乐训练的个体在时序加工中是否具备优势？为解答上述疑问，我们招募32名受过音乐训练者与32名未受音乐训练者，开展了一系列听觉与视觉时序二分任务（Auditory and Visual Temporal Bisection Tasks）实验。我们提出如下研究假设：若音乐训练可调节个体对时序维度的一般性感知敏感性，则受过音乐训练的被试在视觉与听觉时序判断任务中的表现，均会与未受训练者存在显著差异。每名被试需在两个实验组块中完成总计140个试次（视觉与听觉任务各70试次）。针对每名被试，我们分别获取其在视觉与听觉条件下的主观相等点（Point of Subjective Equality, PSE）。实验结果表明，时间知觉存在显著的通道效应：相较于视觉刺激，听觉刺激的时长被系统性高估。令人意外的是，受过音乐训练组相较于未受训练组，表现出低估时长的倾向。尽管上述结果乍看之下有违直觉，但进一步的详细分析显示，音乐训练的时长在受过音乐训练组的时序加工调节中发挥了显著作用。