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The Joint Effect of Social Comparison and Social Distance on Evaluation of Intertemporal Choice Outcomes in Event-related Potential Studies

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Transfer of time-based task expectancy across different timing environments.

Stefanie Aufschnaiter¹, Andrea Kiesel², Roland Thomaschke²

¹Cognition, Action, and Sustainability Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg, Engelbergerstrasse 41, 79085, Freiburg, Germany. stefanie.aufschnaiter@psychologie.uni-freiburg.de.

Psychological Research

|July 26, 2017

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Humans use relative timing, not absolute, for task expectations. This cognitive flexibility allows adaptation to changing time intervals in tasks and interfaces.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

Human expectancies for responses are based on relative temporal relations, not absolute durations.
Understanding time-based task expectancy is crucial for cognitive mechanisms and human-machine applications.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if time-based task expectancy, like response expectancy, relies on relative temporal representations.
To determine if humans can flexibly transfer time-based task expectancies across different timing regimes.

Main Methods:

Combined time-event correlation and task-switching paradigms.
Participants learned associations between time intervals and tasks.
Tested expectancy under globally prolonged or shortened intervals.

Main Results:

Performance was better when task expectancy was based on relative timing.
Performance was worse when task expectancy was based on absolute timing.
Adaptation to predictive delay structures in interfaces persisted despite global timing changes.

Conclusions:

Time-based task expectancy utilizes relative, not absolute, representations of time.
Humans can flexibly transfer learned time-based task expectancies.
Findings have implications for designing adaptive human-machine interfaces.