Duration discrimination of acoustically defined intervals in the 1- to 8-sec range

This experiment indicates how one’s ability to distinguish between two acoustically defined durations, differing by .4 sec, diminishes as the shorter duration is increased from 1 to 8 sec. This effect is interpreted with a model in which one’s “subjective temporal estimate” is a random variable whose variance is directly proportional to the actual stimulus duration, the constant of proportionality being about 6 msec² /sec.