Temporal expectancy modulates phasic alerting in both detection and discrimination tasks

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether phasic alerting might be modulated by temporal expectancy and to determine the processing stages at which this modulation might occur. We manipulated participants' expectancy for the target appearance by systematically varying the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) distribution in both detection and discrimination tasks. There were three temporal expectancy conditions: the non-aging condition in which temporal expectancy was eliminated, the aging condition in which temporal expectancy increased as SOA increased, and the accelerated-aging condition in which temporal expectancy increased more dramatically as SOA increased than in the aging condition. We obtained the same pattern of results in both detection and discrimination tasks: the onset time of the alerting effect was postponed successively across the three temporal expectancy conditions. The present findings suggest that the time course of the alerting effect may be modulated by temporal expectancy, highlighting the importance of taking account into the influence of temporal expectancy in studies involving the time course of cognitive processes. Furthermore, since mechanisms underlying the detection and discrimination tasks may differ in early processing stages involving perceptual analysis and response selection, the same result pattern observed in both tasks is consistent with the hypothesis that the modulation of temporal expectancy on phasic alerting occurs at late processing stages involving motor preparation.