Moderate Effect Of Endogenous Spontaneous Rhythm On Temporal Expectation

Temporal expectation refers to the ability of individuals to use temporal information in the environment which can predict when the target stimulus will appear.The human body can not only use the information in the environment to predict the occurrence of unknown events,but also have certain rhythmical information.Spontaneous motor tempo(SMT),a term referring to an individual's rate of spontaneous motor functions,has been the subject of ongoing studies for more than a century.We often use the finger-tapping paradigm to measure SMT of individuals.It is worth mentioning that in dynamic attending theory,it explains how the external rhythmic information distribute the attention on time dimension,and also emphasizes the attention of itself.In the absence of exogenous stimuli,endogenous distribution of attention will be shown in a spontaneous unloaded rhythm,which have individual differences,it's also called intrinsic period.The intrinsic period can be measured by requiring the individual to make finger tap in the most comfortable and effortless frequency.The research focus of this thesis is to explore whether the individual spontaneous rhythm has certain moderate effect on time expectation.In this paper,four experiments were conducted to explore the moderate effect of endogenous spontaneous rhythm on time expectancy.In experiment 1,the two-task paradigm was adopted.The time orientation task was used for the detection of time expectation,and the expression of endogenous spontaneous rhythm was shown by spontaneous finger-tapping task.The results showed that the endogenous spontaneous rhythm enhanced the time orientation effect and reduced the speed of temporal information processing.It interfered with the generation of the fore-period effect in the case of dual task.The existence of spontaneous rhythm destroys the generation of sequence effect.However,the emergence of time expectation,especially with the cue and target stimuli,also has a certain effect on the regularity of endogenous spontaneous rhythm.Try to eliminate motor activity' interference,in experiment 2,the subjects' finger tapping frequency were converted to sound stimuli,and three auditory stimuli conditions were set to present-baseline,non-rhythm,and rhythm(the same frequency as spontaneous finger tapping).Subjects need to complete time orientation task in those three conditions.The results showed that the time orientation effect increased under the rhythm condition.The generation of sequence effect is disturbed by spontaneous rhythm.In order to eliminate the premature effect and the occurrence probability of the operation target,experiment 3 and 4 increased the catch trial,and the experimental design was analogous to experiment 1 and 2.The results of experiment 3 show that the fore-period effect is eliminated and the time orientation effect still exists.The results of experiment 4 show that the independent existence of spontaneous rhythm does not interfere with the orientation of attention,but it will affect the orientation of attention when combined with the catch trial;the presentation of the rhythm information did not increase the time orientation effect.The sequence effect still exists in experiment 3 and 4,but its'asymmetry is not presented.To sum up,this study found that the presence of spontaneous rhythm enhanced the time orientation effect,and the reason was to enhance the probability that the subject was subjective to the target stimulus.At the same time,it destroys the sequence effect.