Surfacing of Latent Time Memories Supports the Representational Basis of Timing Behavior in Mice.

Animals can adapt their reward expectancy to changes in delays to reward availability. When temporal relations are altered, associative models of interval timing predict that the original time memory is lost due to the updating of the underlying associative weights, whereas the representational models render the preservation of the original time memory (as previously demonstrated in the extinction of conditioned fear). The current study presents the critical test of these theoretical accounts by training mice with two different intervals in a consecutive fashion (short → long or long → short) and then testing timing behaviors during extinction where neither temporal relation is in effect. Mice that were trained with the long interval first clustered their anticipatory responses around the average of two intervals (indirect higher-order manifestation of two memories in the form of temporal averaging), whereas mice trained with the short interval first clustered their responses either around the short or long interval (direct manifestation of memory representations by their independent indexing). We assert that the original memory representation formed during training with the long interval "metrically affords" the integration of subsequent experiences with a shorter interval, allowing their co-activation during extinction. The original memory representation formed during training with the short interval would not metrically afford such integration and thus result in the formation of a new (mutually exclusive) time memory representation, which does not afford their co-activation during extinction. Our results provide strong support for the representational account of interval timing. We provide a new theoretical account of these findings based on the "metric affordances" of the original memory representation formed during training with the original intervals.

Bayes Optimal Integration of Social and Endogenous Uncertainty in Numerosity Estimation.

One of the most prominent social influences on human decision making is conformity, which is even more prominent when the perceptual information is ambiguous. The Bayes optimal solution to this problem entails weighting the relative reliability of cognitive information and perceptual signals in constructing the percept from self-sourced/endogenous and social sources, respectively. The current study investigated whether humans integrate the statistics (i.e., mean and variance) of endogenous perceptual and social information in a Bayes optimal way while estimating numerosities. Our results demonstrated adjustment of initial estimations toward group means only when group estimations were more reliable (or "certain"), compared to participants' endogenous metric uncertainty. Our results support Bayes optimal social conformity while also pointing to an implicit form of metacognition.

The timing database: An open-access, live repository for interval timing studies.

Interval timing refers to the ability to perceive and remember intervals in the seconds to minutes range. Our contemporary understanding of interval timing is derived from relatively small-scale, isolated studies that investigate a limited range of intervals with a small sample size, usually based on a single task. Consequently, the conclusions drawn from individual studies are not readily generalizable to other tasks, conditions, and task parameters. The current paper presents a live database that presents raw data from interval timing studies (currently composed of 68 datasets from eight different tasks incorporating various interval and temporal order judgments) with an online graphical user interface to easily select, compile, and download the data organized in a standard format. The Timing Database aims to promote and cultivate key and novel analyses of our timing ability by making published and future datasets accessible as open-source resources for the entire research community. In the current paper, we showcase the use of the database by testing various core ideas based on data compiled across studies (i.e., temporal accuracy, scalar property, location of the point of subjective equality, malleability of timing precision). The Timing Database will serve as the repository for interval timing studies through the submission of new datasets.

Metric error monitoring as a component of metacognitive processing.

Metacognitive processing constitutes one of the contemporary target domains in consciousness research. Error monitoring (the ability to correctly report one's own errors without feedback) is considered one of the functional outcomes of metacognitive processing. Error monitoring is traditionally investigated as part of categorical decisions where choice accuracy is a binary construct (choice is either correct or incorrect). However, recent studies revealed that this ability is characterized by metric features (i.e., direction and magnitude) in temporal, spatial, and numerical domains. Here, we discuss methodological approaches to investigating metric error monitoring in both humans and non-human animals and review their findings. The potential neural substrates of metric error monitoring measures are also discussed. This new scope of metacognitive processing can help improve our current understanding of conscious processing from a new perspective. Thus, by summarizing and discussing the perspectives, findings, and common applications in the metric error monitoring literature, this paper aims to provide a guideline for future research.

Temporal Error Monitoring Does Not Depend on Working Memory.

Working memory (WM) and metacognition has been documented to be in a reciprocal relationship. This study aims to address if temporal error monitoring performance can be diminished with increased working memory load. We hypothesized that if temporal error monitoring has commonalities with perceptual error monitoring, temporal error monitoring performance should be diminished by increased working memory load. Participants completed a temporal error monitoring task in a dual task design in which the secondary task was a letter alphabetization task. Results revealed no disrupting effect of WM load on either confidence or short-long judgments as being different metrics of temporal error monitoring ability. These results demonstrate that unlike perceptual error monitoring, WM and temporal error monitoring have distinct processing mechanisms. With this result, the current study suggests that temporal and perceptual error monitoring may partially rely on different mechanisms. Results are discussed within A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM), pacemaker-accumulator model and temporal error monitoring frameworks.

Humans can monitor trial-based but not global timing errors: Evidence for relative judgements in temporal error monitoring.

Humans can monitor the magnitude and direction of their temporal errors in individual trials. Based on the predictions of our model of temporal error monitoring that rely on a relative comparison of internal clock readings, we predict that participants would monitor their timing errors in individual trials, but not the direction of their global timing errors without external feedback. One study has indeed found that accurate self-monitoring of average timing biases required external feedback with directional information. The current study investigates how different sources of feedback (i.e., internal or external) affect performance in the self-monitoring of average timing bias. Four groups of participants were tested in a temporal reproduction task. Participants in the self-evaluation condition evaluated the direction and size of their time reproduction errors in individual trials. In the accurate feedback condition, participants received explicit trial-based feedback regarding the direction of their error while participants in the partially accurate feedback condition received trial-based feedback according to the accuracy of short-long judgements of another participant in the self-evaluation condition. Participants in the control condition reproduced only the target duration without making any judgements regarding their reproduction performance or receiving any external feedback about it. Results showed that while participants accurately monitor timing errors in individual trials, in none of the experimental conditions were they more accurate than the chance level in terms of evaluating the direction of their average temporal bias. We discuss these results in terms of the temporal error monitoring model introduced by Akdogan and Balci. Thus, our findings suggest that external directional feedback does not have any informational value for global temporal bias judgements above and beyond internal self-monitoring.

Temporal error monitoring with directional error magnitude judgements: a robust phenomenon with no effect of being watched.

A key aspect of metacognition is the ability to monitor performance. A recent line of work has shown that error-monitoring ability captures both the magnitude and direction of timing errors, thereby pointing at the metric composition of error monitoring [e.g., Akdogan and Balci (J Exp Psychol https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000265 , 2017)]. These studies, however, primarily used a composite variable that combined isolated measures of ordinal confidence ratings (as a proxy for error magnitude judgement) and "shorter/longer than the target" judgements. In two experiments we tested temporal error monitoring (TEM) performance with a more direct measure of directional error magnitude rating on a continuum. The second aim of this study is to test if TEM performance is modulated by the feeling of being watched that was previously shown to influence metacognitive-like monitoring processes. We predicted that being watched would improve TEM performance, particularly in participants with high timing precision (a proxy for high task mastery), and disrupt TEM performance in participants with low timing precision (a proxy for low task mastery). In both experiments, we found strong evidence for TEM ability. However, we did not find any reliable effect of the social stimulus on TEM performance. In short, our results demonstrate that metric error monitoring is a robust metacognitive phenomenon, which is not sensitive to social influence.