Global and Local Deviance Effects in the Processing of Temporal Patterns

Perceptual and sensorimotor events are often experienced as temporal patterns, that is, identified as sequences based on their temporal features. While current timing models propose separate mechanisms supporting the processing of single intervals and temporal patterns, they leave partially unclear whether the latter entails the processing of both individual intervals and the overall structure of a pattern, or only one of these features. Here, we narrowed this question down by investigating how violations of regularity within the individual intervals of a temporal sequence (i.e., local violations) and in its overall structure (i.e., global violations) differentially affect its reproduction. We tested these violation effects in three experiments in which the sequences were experienced either in the visual or auditory domain and had either simple or complex structures. Results showed that the precision in reproducing simple visual and auditory patterns was primarily affected by local violations, whereas global violations mostly impacted the reproduction of visual patterns with complex structures. These detrimental effects were partially explained by rescaling and bias effects in the reproduced patterns. Overall, our findings indicate that the processing and reproduction of temporal patterns differentially weigh individual intervals and global structure, depending on sensory modality and, for visual patterns, on structural complexity.