Modeling Anticipatory Timing

Description

I think this can easily become a whole career topic for someone, I just haven't decided whether I want it to be mine. Partly because it is an extremely intricate topic. What is time? How do we perceive it ? How does it affect - if not give rise - to our behavior ? I am certain - and I say this with the naivete of a grad student - that a generalised theory and a robust model of subjective timing will be able to explain and predict behavior better than individual models of phenomena. But anyway, I digress, my work on this topic so far has been mostly tipping my toes into the timing literature and paradigms. All behavior is dynamic, all perception is dynamic, everything exists and gets processed in the brain dynamically. So then it does not make sense to try and understand people's behavior in segregated snapshots or timestamps because it can never situate people along a continuum of behavior. Again, I digress... never ending problem for me... THIS WORK, focuses on simply testing people's behavior on paradigms that extend past reactive tasks. Most of the experimental literature involves exposing an individual to some rapid stimulus with the aim to explore how the participant reacts to said stimulus. While this approach has its merit for many reasons and topics, it remains very detached from the reality of everyday life. A lot of what we do in our lives involves planning and thinking ahead about upcoming events even at the most basic level. For instance, when should I leave the house to arrive at X location by XYZ time. Or given my current speed and distance from the traffic light, should I speed up and make it past the orange light or should I slow down and stop ? Some people are just better than this, think about your favorite athlete and how she/he can estimate the time and location of a flying object (ie catching a ball) with absolute precision vs your friend that you will look straight into the eyes, say "CATCH" and they will still stand there as the flying object hits them in the face (test ran this many times with my siblings..). So what I am (very slowly) trying to get at is the reality of our substantial individual differences when it comes to timing estimates, judgements, and planning. I believe that understanding these differences at a fundamental level will unlock answers for many other types of behavior, both typical and atypical.

Modeling