Psychometric functions for temporal discrimination: Duration or log duration?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychophysics
• Sensory Perception

Background:

• Duration discrimination is commonly analyzed using psychometric functions.
• Typically, test duration (seconds or milliseconds) is the independent variable.
• Other sensory modalities often use log stimulus magnitude due to Weber's law.

Purpose of the Study:

• To empirically determine if duration discrimination data fit psychometric functions of duration or log duration better.
• To compare the fitting accuracy of linear duration versus log duration models.

Main Methods:

• A simulation study identified optimal experimental designs for comparing function fits.
• An empirical study used a same-different task with 1,200 trials across 11 test durations.
• Both duration and log duration psychometric functions were fitted to 45 collected datasets.

Main Results:

• Psychometric functions of duration provided a better fit in only 15.6% of cases.
• Simulation results aligned with empirical findings, showing better fits for log duration functions when data were generated that way.
• Analysis of 69 published papers (17,000+ functions) confirmed the superiority of log duration fits.

Conclusions:

• Log duration psychometric functions offer a more accurate model for duration discrimination data.
• This approach aligns with principles observed in other sensory discrimination tasks.
• The findings suggest a standardized, more accurate method for analyzing temporal perception data.