Page 50 - It' about time: Studying the Encoding of Duration
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                                Attention gates the selective encoding of duratione duration after-effect  Introduction Temporal information is crucial to our interaction with the external world. Analyzing the temporal order and duration of events allows us to learn about the temporal regularities in the world around us. We can use this knowledge to predict future events, guide our decisions, and plan the timing of our actions (Buhusi & Meck, 2005; Fraisse, 1984). Most visual scenes contain numerous sources of temporal information. In a scene containing multiple events, each event contains information about its own duration as well as information about the time between different events. As a result, the amount of temporal information available in our environment can become very large. Despite this abundance of temporal information, most temporal information is not relevant 3 for our immediate behavior. This creates the need for effective selection of relevant temporal information, to avoid irrelevant information from affecting our behavior. Visual attention provides a means by which relevant visual information can be selected against concurrent, irrelevant information (James, 1890). For example, directing attention towards one of multiple objects or features during adaptation leads to modulation of the resulting after-effects for these objects or features (Alais & Blake, 1999; Festman & Ahissar, 2004; Lankheet & Verstraten, 1995; Rhodes et al., 2011; Spivey & Spirn, 2000; Suzuki, 2001). These modulations of after-effect magnitude demonstrate differential processing as a result of attentional selection, and have been proposed to reflect changes in the strength of encoding of attended versus unattended information (Alais & Blake, 1999). This proposal is supported by neurophysiological studies demonstrating that attention modulates the response of visual neurons by increasing both response amplitude and selectivity (Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Moran & Desimone, 1985; S. O. Murray & Wojciulik, 2004; Reynolds et al., 1999; Treue & Martínez Trujillo, 1999). Together, these results suggest that visual attention provides a mechanism for the selective encoding of relevant versus non-relevant stimulus information by modulating the degree to which visual information is encoded. While the role of attention in the selection of non-temporal properties is well established, there has been little investigation into its role in the selection of temporal properties. Several studies have demonstrated that the extent to which an event is attended can influence the perceived duration of  49 


































































































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