Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 May;83(4):1897-1906. doi: 10.3758/s13414-020-02225-6. Epub 2020 Dec 29.
Many everyday decisions require an accurate perception of how much time has passed since a previous event. Although humans estimate time intervals with a high degree of mean accuracy, the precision of estimations varies greatly between individuals. In situations in which accurate timing is rewarded but responding too early is punished, the optimal amount of risk is directly dependent on the precision of the timer. Previously, it was found that humans and rodents displayed near-optimal adjustment of their mean response time based on their individual precision and the level of punishment. It is as of yet unknown whether these strategies of optimality in interval timing are specific to the timing domain, or instead reflect an ability that generalizes to other sensorimotor modalities of decision making. Here, we address this by combining a temporal reproduction experiment and a distance estimation experiment with an identical reward scheme. We found that participants approached optimality in both tasks, but generally underadjusted their responses in the face of high risk. As this individual adjustment was consistent over modalities, these results can best be explained by assuming that the adjustment of behavior towards optimal performance is driven by a modality independent mechanism.
许多日常决策都需要准确感知上次事件发生后经过了多长时间。尽管人类对时间间隔的估计具有很高的平均准确性，但个体之间的估计精度差异很大。在准确计时会得到奖励但过早反应会受到惩罚的情况下，最优风险量直接取决于计时器的精度。此前，人们发现人类和啮齿动物会根据其个体精度和惩罚水平，近乎最优地调整其平均反应时间。目前尚不清楚这些时间间隔计时中的最优策略是否仅限于计时领域，还是反映了一种能够推广到其他感觉运动决策模式的能力。在这里，我们通过结合时间再现实验和距离估计实验以及相同的奖励方案来解决这个问题。我们发现参与者在两个任务中都接近最优，但在面对高风险时通常反应不足。由于这种个体调整在不同模式下是一致的，因此可以假设行为向最优性能的调整是由一个独立于模式的机制驱动的，这些结果可以得到最好的解释。
