Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 50
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2016-16050-6

Regular Article

A test of multiple correlation temporal window characteristic of non-Markov processes

¹ Istituto Nazionale di Ottica del CNR, Firenze, Italy
² Università di Firenze, Firenze, Italy

^* e-mail: alessandro.farini@ino.it

Received: 9 October 2015
Accepted: 30 December 2015
Published online: 1 March 2016

Abstract

We introduce a sensitive test of memory effects in successive events. The test consists of a combination K of binary correlations at successive times. K decays monotonically from K = 1 for uncorrelated events as a Markov process. For a monotonic memory fading, always. Here we report evidence of a temporal window in cognitive tasks consisting of the visual identification of the front face of the Necker cube after a previous presentation of the same. We speculate that memory effects provide a temporal window with and this experiment could be a possible first step towards a better comprehension of this phenomenon. The behaviour is maximal at an inter-measurement time around 2s with inter-subject differences. The persists over a time window of 1s around ; outside this window the behaviour is recovered. The universal occurrence of a window in pairs of successive perceptions suggests that, at variance with single visual stimuli eliciting a suitable response, a pair of stimuli shortly separated in time displays mutual correlations.