Controlling for temporal discounting shifts rats from geometric to human-like arithmetic bisection

How our brains measure the passage of time is still largely open for debate. One behavioral task commonly used to study how durations are perceived is the Temporal Bisection Task, in which subjects categorize time durations as either “short” or “long.” The duration equally likely to be categorized as short or long is known as the bisection point. It has been consistently demonstrated that for humans, the bisection point is near the arithmetic mean of the longest and shortest durations the subject was trained on. In contrast, for non-human subjects it has been consistently found near the geometric mean. This difference implies that humans may process or represent temporal durations differently than other species. Here we present a behavioral model that reconciles the differences by demonstrating that rats’ performance on this task is driven not only by their noisy estimates of duration, but also by the temporally-discounted value of future rewards. The model correctly predicts shifts in the bisection point induced by unequal rewards and explains otherwise-paradoxical psychometric reversals documented three decades ago. Furthermore, as predicted by the model, we found that modifying the Temporal Bisection Task to eliminate the temporally-discounted reward component shifted the rats’ bisection point from the geometric mean to the arithmetic mean, thus bringing the rat results into line with the human results. We therefore propose that humans and rats (and perhaps other non-human subjects as well) process temporal information similarly, and that the difference between them in the Temporal Bisection Task may be simply due to rats weighing temporal discounting of future rewards more strongly than humans.