Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Temporal expectation for future events allows people to prepare more efficiently for the future. In sensorimotor tasks, it has been considered as an important factor that influences the accuracy and speed of responding to specific sensory events. However, there was no consensus whether the temporal expectation functioning in sensorimotor tasks is simply an emergent property of task-specific, low-level circuits, or an abstract representation shared by higher-level cognition. In four experiments, we asked whether two simultaneously processed tasks—one of lower-level and the other of higher-level cognition—would be influenced by the same temporal expectation. One task was speeded response to a target stimulus, where the target was cancelled on 30% of the trials. The other task was a real-time gambling task, where participants needed to predict from time to time whether the current trial would end up with target or cancellation. Both the target and cancellation latencies followed specific distributions, with the distribution of cancellation latencies varied across blocks. Participants’ choices in gambling provided real-time measures of the updating of temporal expectation over time, which suggest imperfect representation of temporal distributions. Importantly, we found that on a trial when participants predicted an ending of cancellation instead of target, their subsequent response to the target was strikingly slower (up to 1/3 increase in response time). It implies temporal expectation is shared across higher-level and lower-level cognitive tasks.