Keele Research Repository

Social scientists have described noise as “sound out of place” (Bailey, 1996, p. 50). This implies that the human experience of a stimulus is not simply a reflection of its intrinsic properties, but depends on the social-contextual meanings attributed to it. Following Bruner’s lead (Bruner, 1957; Bruner & Goodman, 1947), psychologists have confirmed the importance of social meaning for perception, especially visual information processing (Balcetis & Lassiter, 2010). In the research reported here, we extended this perspective to time perception and asked if an ambiguous auditory stimulus is processed differently as a function of its social meaning.