Abstract
It has been proposed that temporal perception is implemented in a “time window” of approximately 3 s which we experience as “present”. Using mismatch negativity (MMN), we tested the hypothesis whether a time window of 3 s is selective for pre-attentively detecting the violation of regularity in a stimulus sequence by employing different interstimulus intervals. Our results showed that in frontal midline areas, the amplitudes of MMN were significantly larger for the shorter interstimulus intervals up to 3 s than for the longer ones. In lateralized frontal areas, male subjects seemed to have a stronger effect in the temporal modulation of the MMN, which might deserve further investigation. We conclude that a time window of 3 s is selective for neuronal mechanisms to process deviant stimuli and that information processing is temporally segmented, creating a “subjective present” in discrete sequential steps.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Projects 31371018, 91120004, 31100735, and J1103602), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS Visiting Professorships for Senior International Scientists, 2013T1S0029).
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Wang, L., Lin, X., Zhou, B. et al. Subjective present: a window of temporal integration indexed by mismatch negativity. Cogn Process 16 (Suppl 1), 131–135 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0687-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0687-8