# Global and Local Deviance Effects in the Processing of Temporal Patterns

## TL;DR

The study shows how we process and reproduce temporal patterns differently based on sensory modality and pattern complexity.

## Contribution

It reveals that local and global violations affect pattern reproduction differently depending on modality and structure.

## Key findings

- Local violations mainly affect reproduction of simple visual and auditory patterns.
- Global violations mostly impact complex visual patterns.
- Rescaling and bias effects partially explain these impacts.

## Abstract

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.

Our experience of the world is inherently structured by temporal patterns. Yet a full understanding of how we process such patterns is still lacking. Across three finger‐tapping experiments employing the local–global paradigm, we show that the processing and reproduction of temporal patterns rely on a differential weighting of their individual elements and overall structure. This weighting depends on both the structural complexity of the patterns and the sensory modality in which they are experienced.