Speed of response initiation in a time-to-contact discrimination task reflects the use of eta

Avoiding collisions and making interceptions seem to require an organism to estimate the time that will elapse before an object will arrive to the point of observation (time-to-contact). The most outstanding account for precise timing has been the tau hypothesis. However, recent studies demonstrate that tau is not the only source of information in judging time-to-contact. By measuring reaction time in a time-to-contact discrimination task, we show that the eta function, which is a specific combination of optical size and rate of expansion, explains both accuracy and the observed RT pattern. The results conform to the hypothesis that the observers initiate the response when eta reaches a response threshold value.