Trace Theory of Perception for Temporal Bisection

What is it about?

“Is this a long time? He asks.” “Compared to what?” “Well, say, compared to 1 versus 10 [seconds, minutes, years]”. Your friend is asking you to partition a continuum of 1-10 into two parts—long or short. This is a partition task. How do we do it? This article explains. Memories of intervals are projected onto a logarithmic magnitude scale where they are compared. This predicts the midpoint to be just above the geometric mean of the endpoints. But it does not take into account the questions that your friend might continue to ask—”well, then, is …this a long time?” These successive questions are probes. Their distribution warps our responses. That is because we want to give an informative response to our friend. To do that best we place our criterion at the median of the questions, where we can say long and short equally often. The tradeoff between calling it like it is, and being most informative, predicts the bisection point in more than 100 experiments.

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