Pure timing in temporal differentiation.
Separate the pause from the response and temporal differentiation follows Weber’s law just like discrimination.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Pigeons pecked for food on a key. The catch: only pauses of a set length earned the reinforcer.
The lab set-up let the bird start and end the pause with a single peck. This isolated pure pause timing from the act of pecking.
By removing the response itself from the clock, the study could test if Weber’s law still rules temporal differentiation.
What they found
When pause timing stood alone, the birds’ timing errors grew in step with the target duration.
This pattern matches Weber’s law: a 10 % pause feels the same whether it is 2 s or 20 s.
Earlier work had shown odd bends in the data; those bends vanished once the response was pulled out of the clock.
How this fits with other research
Rapport et al. (1982) first showed pigeons can treat their own pauses as cues. The 1985 study zooms in on the pause clock itself, proving the cue follows Weber’s law.
de Villiers (1980) used the same free-operant method for temporal discrimination. The new paper shows differentiation obeys the same law once you scrub away the response artifact.
McIntire et al. (1987) later pitted Weber’s law against optimality theory in adult humans. People timed responses to minimize delay to reward, a result that sits on top of the clean Weber baseline the pigeon work revealed.
Why it matters
If you shape self-pacing skills—like waiting before answering or pausing before a transition—build the pause as its own response. Let the learner start and end the wait with one clear action. This removes motor noise and lets the scalar timing system you are counting on do its job. Expect error to scale with length; plan your criterion and reinforcement windows accordingly.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Temporal control appears to depend on whether the critical durations are those of stimuli or those of responses. Stimulus timing (temporal discrimination) supports Weber's law, whereas response timing (temporal differentiation) indicates decreasing relative sensitivity with longer time intervals. The two types of procedure also yield different conclusions in scaling experiments designed to study the functional midpoint of two or more durations (temporal bisection procedures). In addition, the fractional-exponent power relation between emitted and required duration usually found with animals in differentiation experiments conflicts with deductions from formal analyses. The experiment reported here derived from considering differentiation arrangements as schedules of reinforcement. When analyzed from this perspective, the procedures are tandem schedules involving a required pause followed by a response, and it is the pause alone that involves temporal control. A choice procedure separated timing from responding, and enabled observations of pause timing in isolation. Pure temporal control in differentiation consisted of linear overestimation of the standard duration, and Weber's law described sensitivity. These results indicate that the two problems, the fractional-exponent power relations and the apparently different nature of sensitivity in differentiation and discrimination, disappear when temporal control is observed alone in differentiation.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1985 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1985.43-183