Although humans are well capable of precise time measurement, their duration judgments are nevertheless susceptible to temporal context. Previous research on temporal bisection has shown that duration comparisons are influenced by both stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics. However, theories proposed to account for bisection performance lack a plausible justification of how the effects of stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics are actually combined in temporal judgments. To explain the various contextual effects in temporal bisection, we develop a unified ensemble-distribution account (EDA), which assumes that the mean and variance of the duration set serve as a reference, rather than the short and long standards, in duration comparison. To validate this account, we conducted three experiments that varied the stimulus spacing (Experiment 1), the frequency of the probed durations (Experiment 2), and the variability of the probed durations (Experiment 3). The results revealed significant shifts of the bisection point in Experiments 1 and 2, and a change of the sensitivity of temporal judgments in Experiment 3—which were all well predicted by EDA. In fact, comparison of EDA to the extant prior accounts showed that using ensemble statistics can parsimoniously explain various stimulus set-related factors (e.g., spacing, frequency, variance) that influence temporal judgments.

尽管人类有能力进行精确的时间测量，但他们的持续时间判断仍然容易受到时间背景的影响。先前对时间二分法的研究表明，持续时间比较受刺激间隔和集合统计的影响。然而，提出的解释二分性能的理论缺乏对刺激间隔和整体统计的影响如何在时间判断中实际结合的合理理由。为了解释时间二分中的各种上下文影响，我们开发了一个统一的集成分布帐户（EDA），它假设在持续时间比较中，以持续时间集的均值和方差作为参考，而不是长短标准。为了验证这个说法，我们进行了三个实验，这些实验改变了刺激间隔（实验 1）、探测持续时间的频率（实验 2）和探测持续时间的可变性（实验 3）。结果表明，实验 1 和实验 2 中的二分点发生了显着变化，实验 3 中时间判断的敏感性发生了变化——这些都被 EDA 很好地预测了。事实上，将 EDA 与现有的先前帐户进行比较表明，使用集合统计可以简洁地解释影响时间判断的各种刺激集相关因素（例如，间距、频率、方差）。