This paper addresses two questions. At a general level, our concern is with whether human identification and discrimination of short temporal durations can be described in terms of the same principles that are known to characterise identification and discrimination of other simple perceptual stimuli (e.g., weights, loudnesses, or line lengths). Is a unified account possible? Recent models of timing have been developed independently from earlier traditions of modeling perceptual identification and discrimination; here in contrast we argue that similar principles may apply in both cases.A second, more specific, issue that we address concerns shifts in the temporal bisection point (the duration that is equally likely to be judged the same as the shortest or longest magnitude in a stimulus set). Several models of timing have proposed accounts of bisection point shifts that are specific to temporal processing; here we argue that a more general account of bisection point shifts can be given in terms of a model developed outside the temporal domain: Range Frequency Theory (RFT; e.g., Parducci, 1965Parducci, , 1995. The predictions of this claim are explored with a simple mathematical model, which we term Temporal Range Frequency Theory, and tested in two experiments.
Models of timing.Over the past decade, understanding of human timing has been advanced through the use of temporal generalization and temporal bisection tasks. In the temporal generalization task, participants are exposed to a standard stimulus of a fixed duration. They then judge whether or not subsequently presented stimuli are of the same duration as the standard. Here we focus on temporal bisection tasks, a variety of which have been developed for use with human adults and children