The temporal oddball effect – that is, the phenomenon that the duration of an oddball stimulus is overestimated when compared to the duration of a standard stimulus which is repeatedly presented in a stream – is thought to be driven by prediction errors. Suprisingly, and in contrast to this predominant hypothesis, we found that a more predictable oddball object (e.g., a pizza following a pizza cutter) is overestimated to a larger degree than a fully unpredictable oddball (e.g., a rubber duck following a pizza cutter). How could this be explained?
