A Dissociation between Reaction Time to Sinusoidal Gratings and Temporal-Order Judgment

Abstract

The effect of the spatial frequency (SF) of visual gratings on reaction time (RT) and temporal-order judgment (TOJ) was examined in three experiments. In experiment 1 the visual stimuli were vertical sinusoidal gratings with SFs between 2 and 8 cycles deg⁻¹ and the comparison stimulus in the TOJ task was a 2300 Hz tone. Whereas SF had a highly significant effect on RT, it left TOJ completely unaffected. To test whether this dissociation was due to the sharp (high SF) horizontal edges of the gratings, a second experiment was carried out with circular stimuli with no sharp edges. These stimuli did produce an effect of SF on TOJ, but it was significantly smaller than was the effect on RT. In experiment 3 we confirmed that this difference was not due to differences in grating orientation between the first two experiments. These findings (a) solve discrepancies between findings reported in the literature and (b) strongly suggest that RT and TOJ cannot be regarded as converging operations for determining ‘visual latency’. This dissociation can best be accounted for by assuming that the output of early stimulus analysis can feed directly into the motor system (direct parameter specification), whereas the conscious representation that is used for TOJ is based on later integrative processes.