The Effect of Repetition Suppression Phenomenon and Frequency of the Auditory Stimulus on Perceived Duration

Repetitive presentation of a stimulus causes reduction in neural response to it. The so called repetition suppression phenomenon is assumed to be correlated with perceived time compression in visual tasks. This study aimed to determining the effect of repetition of an auditory stimulus as well as the frequency of a pure tone on its'' perceived duration. The oddball paradigm was used for this purpose in a time discrimination task performed on 18 male and female students. Duration Distortion Factor was calculated from the psychometric curve of each participant. Results of this study indicated that presentation of an oddball stimulus after repetitive presentation of a standard stimulus leads to time dilation. Also a significant increase in estimated time was observed by increasing the frequency of the oddball stimulus. Temporal keys in durations bellow the second، are first extracted locally in modality-specific areas and then these keys are combined in higher cortical areas، this causes that both the repetition suppression phenomenon and inherent stimulus features such as the frequency of tones affect the duration perception.