Holistic temporal order judgment of tones requires top-down disentanglement

How temporal sequence gets organized is a central topic in cognitive processing. In a high-frequency time window of tens of milliseconds, the temporal order is reconstructed rather than mirroring the sequence of events objectively in physical time. Two separate phases or strategies, a holistic coding phase that groups successively presented events as a gestalt and a disentanglement phase that decodes the temporal order of discrete events from the gestalt representation, may presumably be involved in the perception of temporal order across different modalities. With a temporal order adaptation protocol of pure tones using glide adaptors, the present study demonstrated a dissociation between constant discriminability and shifted subjective simultaneity across different adaptor directions. While discriminability of temporal order was not adapted by glides, revealing a constant coding sensitivity of different asynchronies, the shift of subjective simultaneity indicated the recalibration of a top-down disentanglement of the holistic processing under the influence of glide adaptors. The results suggest a dual-phase holistic processing in temporal order perception, supporting two separate cognitive strategies for event timing on the sub-second level.