Temporal context calibrates interval timing

Abstract

We use our sense of time to identify temporal relationships between events and to anticipate actions. How well we can exploit temporal contingencies depends on the variability of our measurements of time. We asked humans to reproduce time intervals drawn from different underlying distributions. As expected, production times were more variable for longer intervals. Surprisingly however, production times exhibited a systematic regression towards the mean. Consequently, estimates for a sample interval differed depending on the distribution from which it was drawn. A performance-optimizing Bayesian model that takes the underlying distribution of samples into account provided an accurate description of subjects’ performance, variability and bias. This finding suggests that the central nervous system incorporates knowledge about temporal uncertainty to adapt internal timing mechanisms to the temporal statistics of the environment.