Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, a dynamic niodel of human time perception is presented which treats time as phase, relative to the period of an oscillator that adapts its oscillation rate in response to an input rhythm. The adaptive oscillator mechanism is characterized by four fundamental properties: (1) a preferred oscillation rate which captures the notion of a preferred tempo, (2) a fast-acting synchronisation procedure which models our ability to perceptually lock onto salient aspects of a rhythm, (3) a decay process to oppose synchroniaation, and (4) a drift process which causes the preferred rate to gradually drift towards the adapted rate, thereby modeling the context effects of long-term pattern exposure. By assuming that sensitivity to duration is a function of oscillator entrainment to the contextual rhythm, the model provides a qualitative match to data on tempo discrimination, and predicts the types of errors subjects would make on such tasks. These predictions are in agreement with data showing that subjects overestimate short intervals and underestimate long intervals.