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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1393065

Interference across time: Dissociating short from long temporal interference

Provisionally accepted
Ilanit Hochmitz Ilanit Hochmitz *Ahmad Abu-Akel Ahmad Abu-Akel Yaffa Yeshurun Yaffa Yeshurun
  • University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Our ability to identify an object is often impaired by the presence of preceding and/or succeeding task-irrelevant items. Understanding this temporal interference is critical for any theoretical account of interference across time and for minimizing its detrimental effects. Therefore, we used the same sequences of 3 orientation items, orientation estimation task, and computational models, to examine temporal interference over both short (<150ms; visual masking) and long (175-475ms; temporal crowding) intervals. We further examined how inter-item similarity modifies these different instances of temporal interference. Qualitatively different results emerged for interference of different scales.Interference over long intervals mainly degraded the precision of the target encoding while interference over short intervals mainly affected the signal-to-noise ratio. Although both interference instances modulated substitution errors (reporting a wrong item) and were alleviated with dissimilar items, their characteristics were markedly disparate. These findings suggest that different mechanisms mediate temporal interference of different scales.

    Keywords: interference, temporal crowding, Visual Masking, Mixture-model analysis, Similarity

    Received: 28 Feb 2024; Accepted: 04 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Hochmitz, Abu-Akel and Yeshurun. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ilanit Hochmitz, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

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