Temporal reproduction within and across senses: Testing the supramodal property of the pacemaker-counter model

The human ability to compare time between sensory modalities implies a supramodal representation of time. This notion is consistent with the pacemaker-counter model (PCM), the core architecture of prominent timing theories. Some theorists, however, have promoted modality-specific timing mechanisms, which might hamper crossmodal temporal comparison. This study tested whether PCM is sufficient to account for intra- as well as crossmodal timing. To account for modality-specific timing differences, we proceeded from the common assumption that the pacemaker runs faster for auditory than for visual stimuli. Participants reproduced short and long standards (800 vs. 2,400 ms) by terminating a comparison stimulus. In Experiment 1, in each trial the sensory modalities (auditory vs. visual) of the standard and the comparison were the same (congruent) or different (incongruent). PCM implies that timing performance depends on modality order. However, there should be virtually no congruency effects on overall performance. Although the results largely matched the predictions of PCM, there were substantial congruency effects on reproduction variability especially in the subsecond range. Three intramodal control experiments, however, showed that similar congruency effects can be observed when the standard and the comparison differ in intramodal characteristics. This suggests that temporal representations are not isolated from nontemporal stimulus characteristics, even when these are subtle and within the same modality. The present results can be interpreted as evidence for sensory timing within the subsecond range. Nevertheless, we used computer simulations to evaluate extensions of PCM that could account for the present result pattern, while retaining PCM's supramodal property. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).