Categorical Scaling of Duration Bisection in Pigeons (Columba livia), Mice (Mus musculus), and Humans (Homo sapiens)

Abstract

A fundamental assumption underlying research in translational neuroscience is that animal models represent many of the same neurocognitive mechanisms and decision processes used by humans. Clear demonstrations of such correspondences will be crucial to the discovery of the neurobiological underpinnings of higher-level cognition. One domain likely to support fruitful comparisons is interval timing, because humans and other animals appear to share basic similarities in their ability to discriminate the durations of events in the seconds-to-minutes range. Here, we report that in a duration-bisection procedure using a series of anchor durations ranging from 2 through 5 s, pigeon, mouse, and human subjects classified a given signal duration as subjectively shorter than an adjacent, physically shorter signal duration when the two durations lay on opposite sides of a putative category boundary. These bisection reversals provide strong evidence for continuity of temporal cognition across a wide range of vertebrate species.

Expectancy in humans in multisecond peak-interval timing with gaps

“…Moderate or weak negative correlations between start and spread times also suggested that some variability was related to response threshold variability. These conclusions were similar to those in animal studies (e.g., Cheng & Miceli, 1996;Cheng & Westwood, 1993;Church, Meck, & Gibbon, 1994;Matell, Bateson, & Meck, 2006), revealing notable similarities in timing with humans, birds, and rodents (see Penney, Gibbon, & Meck, 2008). Correlations were also analyzed to examine the contribution of memory and threshold processes in the present study.…”

“…This interpretation is clearly related to the hypothesis put forward to account for the effects of manipulating gap location in the present study. As noted by Lejeune et al, comparable findings in animal and in human timing studies suggest that similar mechanisms may underlie timing performance in humans and other animals (see also Allan, 1998;Penney et al, 2008). One must be cautious, however, in comparing the results of human and animal timing studies, in part because of notable differences in procedures.…”

GAMIT – A Fading-Gaussian Activation Model of Interval-Timing: Unifying Prospective and Retrospective Time Estimation

“…This is equivalent to saying that time perception obeys Weber's Law (equal relative increments in a stimulus produce equal increments in sensation). This effect is very widely replicated with humans, pigeons, and rodents (see Gibbon et al, , 1997Penney et al, 2008). Similar behavioral responses to time scales can even be found in rate-dependent habituation in C. elegans (Staddon & Higa, 1999).…”

Timing and time perception: A review of recent behavioral and neuroscience findings and theoretical directions

“…There are some specific variations of this method in the animal timing literature that have been adapted for human experimentation. In a classical one known as the bisection method, the shortest and the longest intervals (anchors, or standards) of a series of intervals are first presented several times and are then followed by intervals, including the standards, that have to be categorized as being closer to one of the two anchored standards (Penney, Gibbon, & Meck, 2008). A classical psychometric function can be drawn from these data (Grondin, 2008a): The probability of responding "long" on the y-axis is plotted as a function of the interval value such variable is associated with the capacity to remain as close as possible to the target duration to be estimated.…”