Humans don't time subsecond intervals like a stopwatch.
Many activities require the ability to estimate intervals of time in an accurate and flexible manner. A traditional and popular account suggests that humans possess a kind of internal stopwatch that can be started, paused, and stopped at will. Here we test this idea by measuring variable performance errors in 3 experiments. Participants had to compare the total time accumulated during 1 to 3 short target intervals with a single standard interval. With 2 or more target intervals, participants had to pause, but not reset, their putative internal stopwatches. By establishing baseline performance at 2 different standard durations and extrapolating based on Weber's law, we were able to estimate how much performance should have deteriorated when target segments contained breaks. The decrement in performance we observed far exceeded the stopwatch prediction, and also exceeded the simulated predictions of a modified stopwatch with a slowing pacemaker. The data thus favor either a counter that cannot be paused during subsecond durations or alternative models of subsecond interval duration discrimination that do not posit a count-based metric for time. We discuss several possible strategies that participants might have implemented to apply such clocks in the split-interval task.
City University.
Marta
M
Narkiewicz
City University.
Anna
A
Lambrechts
City University.
Frederik
F
Eichelbaum
City University.
Kielan
K
Yarrow
D000328:Adult; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult