Schedule of Events | Symposia

Computational Mechanisms of Temporal Anticipation in Perception and Action

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Gal Vishne^1,2 (gal.vishne@mail.huji.ac.il), Leon D. Deouell¹, Ayelet N. Landau^1,3; ¹The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ²Columbia University, ³University College London

To interact effectively with our surroundings, we employ strategies to reduce uncertainty. One important source of information is temporal regularities, which enable us to form predictions about when events will occur, and through this, prepare for them in advance (Nobre & Van Ede, 2018). Such preparation was shown to facilitate motor planning, yet the impact of temporal anticipation on perceptual acuity is unknown, and the cognitive computations underlying this process remain debated. To answer these questions, we designed a novel difficult change discrimination task, where the interval between the first and second stimuli was varied on a trial-by-trial basis, drawing from one of three predefined distributions (uniform, exponential and flipped-exponential) and administered it to N=142 participants online. Our results show that both perceptual sensitivity and motor responses are influenced by temporal structure. We employed computational modelling to study the underlying cognitive operations, identifying the logarithmic transformation of the event hazard rate (HR) as the core transformation. This contrasts with recent studies supporting the reciprocal of the PDF as the underlying computation (Grabenhorst et al., 2019, 2021). Importantly, we also reveal a key role for temporal estimation noise in shaping the process at two distinct stages: (1) Encoding, when temporal information is learned and represented and (2) Decoding, when it is extracted and used to guide behavior. These findings shed light on the brain’s capacity to leverage probabilistic temporal information to guide behavior, advancing our understanding of how temporal structure influences perceptual and motor processing.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision