[O6] Oral 6: Prediction, Temporal perception, Computational Modeling

1:15 PM - 1:30 PM JST(4:15 AM - 4:30 AM UTC)

[O6-02] The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant

*Matthias Grabenhorst^1,2, David Poeppel³, Georgios Michalareas^4,1,2 (1. Ernst Struengmann Institute for Neuroscience (Germany), 2. Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Germany), 3. New York University (United States of America), 4. Goethe University (Germany))

Keywords:

Temporal prediction,Probability estimation,Time estimation,Temporal cognition,Weber's law

Humans predict the timing of imminent events to generate fast and precise actions. Such temporal anticipation is critical over the range of hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds. However, it was argued that timing mechanisms differ below and above a boundary at around 1–2 seconds in time perception and interval discrimination (Grondin, J Exp Psychol, 2012; Gibbon et al., Curr Opin Neurobiol, 1997) and duration discrimination (Rammsayer & Lima, Percept Psychophys, 1991; Rammsayer et al, Frontiers in Psychology, 2015) which may affect timing behavior in the anticipation of imminent events. Recent work showed that the brain models the probability density function of events across time, suggesting a canonical mechanism for temporal anticipation (Grabenhorst et al., Nat Commun, 2019 & 2025). Here we investigate whether this core computation remains stable across the described temporal boundaries when the distribution of events is stretched across different time spans. In a Set - Go task, the time between the two cues was randomly drawn from probability distributions which, across experimental blocks, were defined over different time spans. Participants were asked to react as fast as possible to the Go cues and generated > 52000 reaction times (RT). We found that, irrespective of the time span, anticipation, measured as RT, scales with the event distribution. This shows that the key computation – the estimation of event probability density – is invariant across temporal scales. We further found that the variance in anticipation is also scale invariant which contradicts Weber’s law. The results hold in vision and audition, suggesting that the core computations in anticipation are independent of sensory modality. These findings demonstrate that – independent of temporal scale – perceptual systems estimate probability over time to anticipate the timing of future events. We conclude that temporal anticipation, a basic function in cognition, is time-scale invariant.