Gallistel, C. R. (1999).
Can a decay process explain the timing of conditioned responses?
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
71, 264-271.
To explain time-scale invariant distributions of response
latencies, it appears to be necessary to postulate scalar noise
in the remembered intervals, against which the subjective measure
of the currently elapsing interval is compared. At least in some
cases, the observed variability cannot be due to variability in
the subjective intervals written to memory; it must come from
noise (variability) in the reading of a memory. The Staddon and
Higa proposal offers no explanation for the observed variability,
and it is unclear what noise assumption would yield the observed
variability, given their assumption that intervals are timed by a
nonlinear decay process. The decay process cannot plausibly be
represented by the logarithmic function, because it begins and
ends at infinity. The assumption of any form of nonlinear timing
is inconsistent with the most important result of the time-left
experiment, which is that the changeover time increases linearly
with the comparison-standard difference.
Key words: subjective time, time-scale invariance, scalar
variability, response latencies, temporal psychophysics