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How Musical Oddballs Warp Psychological Time, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Oddballs—low-probability, attention-capturing expectancy violations—are judged as longer than non-oddballs, but are temporal intervals that contain oddballs judged as longer than those that do not? In 2 experiments, we tested competing model predictions using a novel and covert measure of subjective duration—musical imagery reproduction. Participants verbally estimated and reproduced with musical imagery repeated, coherent, or incoherent familiar or unfamiliar chord sequences (3.5 s, 7 s, or 12 s) that either did or did not contain dynamic auditory oddballs. Participants verbally estimated repeated chord sequences that contained oddballs as shorter than those that did not, but reproduced with musical imagery incoherent chord …