Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several studies have reported that numerical magnitudes biases temporal judgments, i.e., large numerical magnitude, were perceived to last longer than small numerical magnitude. However, these predictions have been predominantly verified only when the large and small numerical magnitudes were presented in an intermixed fashion where numerical magnitudes varied randomly from trial to trial. We conducted two experiments (Blocked-magnitude and Mixed-Magnitude) using a temporal bisection paradigm to investigate whether numerical context affects temporal processing in a sub-second timescale. The numbers were presented with varying durations. Participants were asked to judge whether the presented durations were shorter or longer. The results suggest that the temporal judgments were affected when small and large numbers were randomly presented in an intermixed manner. However, such effects disappeared when the number magnitudes were presented separately. These results indicate the modulation of attention in number-time interaction, and such crosstalk may not require a generalized magnitude system.