Chapter 4 Application of a mode-control model of temporal integration to counting and timing behavior

Abstract

This chapter discusses the application of a mode-control model of temporal integration to counting and timing behavior. The chapter reviews selected behavioral data obtained from rats performing in multi-modal temporal and numerical discrimination procedures that may be used to support a unified theory for the representation of both time and number. Accompanying these behavioral data will be a discussion of the psychological, computational, and physiological basis for these cognitive abilities. At present, unified theories of timing and counting behavior can be found in two basic forms: a mode-control model of temporal integration and a multiple-oscillator connectionist model. Each of these theoretical architectures has its own strengths and weaknesses that follow the principles of the parent paradigms of information processing descriptions and connectionist networks. The mode-control model, therefore, concentrates on identifying distinct serial stages of analogical information processing that intervene between stimulus input and response output. The connectionist model attempts to define counting and timing processes within a framework of autoassociation networks that code the digital input from multiple oscillators and form part of a parallel distributed processing system. Since both models identify and account for roughly the same amount of variance in the behavioral data, the models are currently thought of as alternatives rather than as substitutions as one might have inferred from their developmental history.