Different Effect of Oddball Serial Position on Duration Dilation of Musicians

When an oddball stimulus is presented within a stream of homogeneous stimuli, its duration tends to be overestimated. An experiment designed to investigate the effect of oddball serial position on subjective duration; An oddball stimulus was embedded in a series of standard stimuli and randomly positioned in each trial. 16 Musicians and 16 nonmusicians participated in the experiment voluntarily and through previous invitation. Participants asked to judge whether the oddball was shorter or longer than the standards. Then, the data of two groups were transformed to the point of subjective equality (PSE) and difference limen (DL) and were compared. The results indicated that for nonmusicians, the oddballs occurring in later positions in the stream of stimuli are perceived to be longer than oddballs occurring in earlier positions. In contrast with the results of nonmusicians, there was no oddball position effect with musician participants; their subjective duration remained constant. The present study indicated that the musicians have higher levels of temporal information processing and provided evidences regarding the strength of musician’s top-down signals.