The "Divided Time Illusion" in Musicians: Evidence of a Rate Limit

The divided time illusion (DTI) is the finding that brief intervals seem longer when they are subdivided by one or more additional events than when they are empty. Two previous multiexperiment studies using different synchronization-continuation tapping tasks demonstrated the DTI in musicians’ perception and production of beat tempo (Repp, 2008; Repp & Bruttomesso, 2009): Subdivided beats seem slower than undivided beats. Each study, however, contained a single condition that yielded puzzling results inconsistent with the DTI; each had intermixed trials with duple and triple metrical subdivision of interbeat intervals (IBIs). Our attempt to replicate the deviant 2008 result failed, now yielding data consistent with the DTI. However, we did replicate the deviant 2009 result and then followed it up by assigning different forms of subdivision (duple, triple, quadruple) to separate trial blocks and varying IBI duration within each block. The results turned out to be quite systematic and consistent with the DTI. Moreover, they revealed that the DTI decreases as IBI duration decreases and vanishes when the subdivision event rate reaches 5–6 Hz. We tentatively attribute the puzzling 2009 result to attenuation of the DTI by mental subdivision of undivided beats, due to memory requirements of the earlier task design. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

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