Effects of Skewed Probe Distributions on Temporal Bisection in Rats: Factors in the Judgment of Ambiguous Intervals
2019
Temporal bisection is a common procedure for the study
of interval timing in humans and non-human animals, in which
participants are trained to discriminate between a “short” and a
“long” interval of time. Following stable and accurate
discrimination, unreinforced probe intervals between the two values
are tested. In temporal bisection studies, intermediate
non-reinforced probe intervals are typically arithmetically- or
geometrically- spaced, yielding point of subjective equality at the
arithmetic and geometric mean of the trained anchor intervals.
Brown et al. (2005) suggest that judgement of the length of an
interval, even when not reinforced, is influenced by its subjective
length in comparison to that of other intervals. This hypothesis
predicts that skewing the distribution of probe intervals shifts
the psychophysical function relating interval length to the
probability of reporting that interval as “long.” Data from the
present temporal bisection study, using rats, suggest that there
may be a within-session shift in temporal bisection responding
which accounts for observed shifts in the psychophysical functions,
and that this may also influence how rats categorize ambiguous
intervals.
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