Expectations about the temporal occurrence of events (when) are often tied with the expectations about certain event-related properties (what and where) happening at these time points. For instance, slowly waking up in the morning we expect our alarm clock to go off; however, the longer we do not hear it the more likely we already missed it. However, most current evidence for complex time-based event-related expectations (TBEEs) is based on the visual modality. Here we tested whether implicit TBEEs can act cross-modally. To this end, visual and auditory stimulus streams were presented which contained early and late targets embedded among distractors (to maximise temporal target uncertainty). Foreperiod-modality-contingencies were manipulated run-wise: visual targets either occurred early in 80% of trials and auditory targets occurred late in 80% of trials or vice versa. Participants showed increased sensitivity for expected auditory early/visual late targets which increased over time while the opposite pattern was observed for visual early/auditory late targets. A benefit in reaction times was only found for auditory early trials. Together, this pattern of results suggests that implicit context-dependent TBEEs for auditory targets after short foreperiods (be they correct or not) dominated and determined which modality became more expected at the late position irrespective of the veridical statistical regularity. Hence, TBEEs in cross-modal and uncertain environments are context-dependent, shaped by the dominant modality in temporal tasks (i.e., auditory) and only boost performance cross-modally when expectations about the event after the short foreperiod match with the run-wise context (i.e., auditory early/visual late).

对事件的时间发生（何时）的期望通常与对在这些时间点发生的某些事件相关属性（什么和在哪里）的期望相关联。例如，早上慢慢醒来，我们希望我们的闹钟响起；然而，我们越久没有听到它，我们就越有可能错过它。然而，目前大多数复杂的基于时间的事件相关预期 (TBEE) 的证据都是基于视觉模态的。在这里，我们测试了隐式 TBEE 是否可以跨模态运行。为此，提出了视觉和听觉刺激流，其中包含嵌入干扰物的早期和晚期目标（以最大化时间目标不确定性）。Foreperiod-modality-contingencies 被逐个操作：视觉目标在 80% 的试验中出现在早期，而听觉目标在 80% 的试验中出现在后期，反之亦然。参与者对预期的听觉早期/视觉晚期目标的敏感性随着时间的推移而增加，而视觉早期/听觉晚期目标则观察到相反的模式。仅在听觉早期试验中发现了反应时间的好处。总之，这种结果模式表明，在较短的前期（无论它们是否正确）之后，听觉目标的隐含上下文相关 TBEE 占主导地位，并决定了哪种方式在后期位置更受预期，而与真实的统计规律无关。因此，跨模态和不确定环境中的 TBEE 依赖于上下文，由时间任务中的主导模态（即，