Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies show that auditory intervals are, in general, more accurately discriminated than visual or tactile intervals(Grondin, 2003). Also for discrimination tasks, when the markers of brief empty intervals are delivered from differentsensory modalities, sensitivity to time is much lower than it is when the markers are delivered from the same modality(Grondin & Rousseau, 1991). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of intermodality on the temporaldiscrimination. Twelve participants (mean = 25.33, SD = 5.12) performed a bisection temporal task. During eight sessions,three conditions were manipulated: certainty about the origin of the second marker (certainty, uncertainty), standardduration (300ms, 900ms), and modality (auditory- auditory, auditory- tactile, auditory-visual). Results showed intramodalintervals are better discriminated than intermodal intervals. In both 300ms and 900ms, intervals were better discriminatedwhen the second modality was auditory than when it was tactile or visual.