Timing can be processed explicitly or implicitly. Temporal orienting is a typical implicit timing through which we can anticipate and prepare an optimized response to forthcoming events. It is, however, not yet clear whether mechanisms such as temporal-pulse accumulation and attentional gating (more attention, more accumulated temporal pulses) underly the internal representations of temporal orienting, as in explicit timing. To clarify this, a dual-task paradigm, consisting of a temporal orienting and an interference task, was adopted. Consistent with the temporal-pulse-accumulation and attentional-gating model, reaction times to the target detection of temporal orienting increased as the interference stimuli were temporally closer to the target, i.e., a location effect for temporal orienting. This effect is likely due to attention being diverted away from temporal orienting to monitor the occurrence of the interference stimuli for a longer time, resulting in greater temporal pulse loss and less accurate temporal orienting for conditions with later interference stimuli. The temporal-pulse-accumulation aspect in temporal orienting received further support by taking an explicit duration reproduction (containing a second temporal-pulse accumulation) as the interference task. On the one hand, temporal orienting became less accurate with increased temporal-pulse-accumulation overlaps between the dual tasks; on the other hand, two-way (one for temporal orienting and the other for duration reproduction), rather than one-way, location effects were observed, implying processing conflicts between the two temporal-pulse accumulations. Taken together, these results suggest that implicit and explicit timing may share common mechanisms upon internal temporal representations.

时序可以显式或隐式处理。时间定向是一个典型的隐式时序，通过该时序我们可以预期并准备对即将发生的事件的优化响应。但是，尚不清楚诸如时间脉冲累积和注意门控（更多注意力，更多累积的时间脉冲）之类的机制是否在时间定向的内部表示中位于显性定时之下。为了阐明这一点，采用了由时间定向和干扰任务组成的双重任务范例。与时间脉冲累积和注意门控模型一致，随着干扰刺激在时间上更接近目标，即时间定向的位置效应，对时间定向的目标检测的反应时间增加。这种影响可能是由于注意力从时间定向转移到更长的时间来监视干扰刺激的发生，导致更大的时间脉冲损失，以及对于具有较晚干扰刺激的条件的时间定向不太准确。通过将显式的持续时间再现（包含第二个时间脉冲累积）作为干扰任务，在时间定向中的时间脉冲累积方面得到了进一步的支持。一方面，随着双重任务之间的时间脉冲积累重叠的增加，时间定向的准确性降低。另一方面，观察到双向（一种用于时间定向，另一种用于持续时间再现）而不是单向的定位效应，这意味着两个时间脉冲累积之间的处理冲突。