The planning status of tones remains unresolved in speech-production studies. This study examines Mandarin tone planning using a cue-distractor paradigm to investigate whether tones can be concurrently activated and competitively planned, a mechanism previously demonstrated mainly for segments. Participants were asked to produce target syllables with different tones, while hearing a distractor syllable with a different tone or a different vowel. We found that participants responded later when the target and distractor differed in tones, revealing an effect of tone perception on tone production (i.e., perceptuomotor effect). Crucially, the equivalence testing showed that the distraction elicited by tone and vowel distractors was statistically equivalent. In addition, responses were slower as the acoustic similarity between tone targets and distractors decreased. The present study therefore provides new evidence for the active role of tone in planning and extends concurrent activation from segments to tones. The trial-level data, analysis files, and auditory stimuli associated with this study are freely available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RGP5T . The experiments reported in this article were not preregistered.
The format of spatial representation is a fundamental issue in cognitive research. Previous studies have shown that blank and grid environments selectively induce polar and Cartesian coordinate patterns, respectively. However, these findings are largely based on reliable blocked designs, leaving it unclear whether such representational formats remain stable under environmental uncertainty. Using a spatial location reproduction paradigm, we applied error correlation analysis to infer the underlying coordinate signatures, while introducing contextual reliability (grid/blank) during either the response phase (Experiment 1) or the encoding phase (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, when uncertainty was introduced at retrieval, polar-consistent error patterns remained relatively preserved under blank encoding. Experiment 2 revealed that encoding-phase uncertainty significantly reduced the difference between polar and Cartesian error patterns across conditions. Meanwhile, encoding-phase uncertainty led to a preferential reliance on Cartesian coordinate features. Within the error-correlation framework, these findings delineate what contextual uncertainty changes (Cartesian signature expression; frame selection) and what it leaves unchanged (a robust polar signature under encoding reliability). The data and analysis code for both experiments are publicly available at the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/znrb6/ ). Neither experiment was preregistered.
Models of auditory functioning posit that physical behaviors (e.g., moving closer to the speaker) and the effortful allocation of cognitive resources (e.g., listening effort), while each constituting specific costs, are both adaptive responses to adverse auditory conditions that may be readily substituted for each other to maximize hearing success. Here we demonstrate that listeners will exchange the costs of physical actions for opportunities to secure easier listening conditions. Our participants could repeatedly key-press to reduce background noise in upcoming trials of a speech-identification task (report the last word of a spoken sentence). The amount of key-pressing varied with factors that impact the need to expend listening effort. In Experiment 1, key-pressing was greatest for high initial-noise levels and for sentences whose final word could not be predicted from the rest of the sentence. These effects replicated in Experiment 2, which employed roughly half the trials and included trial-by-trial subjective-effort ratings. Importantly, key-pressing levels were sensitive both to trial-by-trial fluctuations in subjective effort – participants key-pressed more to secure easier perceptual conditions immediately after trials rated highly-effortful than after low-rated trials – and to fluctuations in hearing success – participants also key-pressed more after incorrect than correct trials. Our evidence that listeners incur the costs of physical actions to both reduce the need for cognitive effort and enhance perceptual accuracy provides support for theories of effortful listening. It also suggests that physical-action measures can provide a quantitative index of the need for, and listeners’ willingness to engage in, effortful exertion to maximize hearing success. Listening effort is an important outcome for assessing hearing performance and hearing-impairment interventions. We show that listeners will readily incur the costs of physical action to reduce the need for cognitive effort as needed to maximize hearing success. Participants’ key-pressing levels corresponded with factors known to impact the need to expend cognitive effort, reflected trial-by-trial fluctuations in subjective effort and hearing success, and were robust across key individual-differences factors. Key-pressing may therefore provide a quantitative index of listeners’ effortful exertion that could be valuable in an audiologic test battery, as it is efficient, easily administered, and requires no specialized equipment.
Spatial extent often biases duration judgments (the kappa effect) more than duration biases spatial judgments (the tau effect), although this asymmetry varies considerably across paradigms. In most paradigms the interval is presented once or compared with one neighbouring interval, and its number of repetitions has never been manipulated. We tested whether the interference pattern changes when the same interval is repeated within a sequence. Thirty participants reproduced either the temporal interval or the spatial extent defined by sequences of 2, 3, or 4 visual circles (inter-stimulus intervals of 700, 1,100, or 1,500 ms; spatial separations of 200, 300, or 400 px). Individual interference slopes quantified each cross-dimensional bias across the three levels of the task-irrelevant dimension. With a single interval (two circles), we observed a reliable kappa effect (d = 0.77) but no reliable tau effect. With repeated intervals (three and four circles), the pattern reversed: the kappa effect was no longer detectable, whereas a tau effect in the classical direction emerged (d = 0.78–0.87), yielding a significant effect-type × sequence-length interaction. Trial-to-trial variability of temporal reproductions did not decrease with repetition, so the reversal was not accompanied by a measurable gain in temporal precision. These findings show that the direction of space–time interference is not fixed but depends on the temporal structure of the stimulus. We propose that sequential repetition shifts observers from estimating an isolated magnitude to predicting the next event of a sequence, in which time, rather than space, serves as the scaffold for extrapolation. Trial-level and subject-level data for this experiment are openly available on the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/M57ZN , together with the supplementary materials and a README file describing the data files and variables. The code used to run the experiment and the analysis scripts are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The experiment was not preregistered.
In language and metaphor, people think of their relationship to time in one of two ways: either as themselves moving in time, or as time moving past them. Take the following question: “If your Wednesday meeting is moved forward by two days, when is the new meeting?” There are two possible answers – depending on your metaphorical “self-time perspective.” If you say “Friday,” then the meeting is pushed ahead as you are moving in time (reflecting a “Mover” perspective). If you say “Monday,” the meeting has moved forward as time moves towards you (reflecting a “Waiter” perspective). Might these differences in thinking about time be reflected in differences in perceived time? In a large-scale exploratory study, subjects reproduced the durations of blank intervals, either before or after an event, and were categorized based on their responses to the ambiguous question above. Those who reported a Waiter perspective tended to show less underestimation in their duration reproductions compared to those who reported a Mover perspective – though the interval position (i.e., before vs. after the event) and type of event (i.e., watching an event vs. performing an action) modulated these differences. These results suggest that whether a subject’s temporal position is fixed (as in a Waiter perspective) or is constantly being updated (as in a Mover perspective) has consequences for their retrospective reproductions of how much time has passed. Navigating a dynamic world may thus shape (and be shaped by) our internal reference frames, not just of space, but also of time. We do not only experience time as going faster or slower depending on what we are doing (e.g., consider a day in a theme park vs. waiting at the dentist’s), we also think about our relationship to time itself in sometimes surprisingly categorically opposing ways: with either time as a medium that we are moving through (i.e., a “Mover” perspective), versus time moving past us (i.e., a “Waiter” perspective). Here, using a simple method of having people reproduce durations of blank intervals, we find that these metaphorical self-time perspectives may correspond to actual differences in their subjective experience of time. Materials and analysis code are available via the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/2m7cn .
