Figure 2.

Experimental design. (a) Trial structure used in all the experiments. ‘*’ Indicates the experiment involved yellow and blue color circles instead of red and green. Before each trial participants selected what color circle they wanted to see by pressing the pre-assigned keys. The outcome appeared after a fixed delay in each experiment, but varied across the experiments [250  ms in Exp 1, Exp 4, Exp 5; 500  ms in Exp 2; 1000  ms in Exp 3]. Randomly on half of the trials participants received the intended outcome and on the other half the unintended outcome. In Exp4, the participants had no choice but were forced to press the key based on the presented word, in this case on half of the trials the word matched the color of the circle (congruent), and on other half it did not match (incongruent). In Exp1, 2, 3 and 4 temporal bisection task was used, the target circle appeared for a variable duration (from 300 ms to 700 ms in steps of 50 ms), and participants reported the duration as either close to short (press ‘s’) or long (press ‘l’) anchor duration. In Exp5, a verbal estimation task was used, the target circle appeared for a variable duration (210 ms, 460 ms, 710 ms, 960 ms, 1190 ms), and participants used the computer mouse to report the estimated duration in the range of 100 ms to 1300 ms. (b) Distribution of intended and unintended outcomes.