Psychophysical theories of duration discrimination

There are few quantitative theories of duration discrimination and few established empirical phenomena to guide theorizing. This paper discusses three such theories and several empirical findings. The theories assume that the discrimination is based only upon information extracted from the temporal extent of the stimulus pattern, and experimental evidence is presented that clearly supports this assumption for many stimulus patterns. Recent findings which indicate that duration information is analyzed in certain ways that are fundamentally different from other stimulus dimensions are reviewed, the duration discrimination psychometric function is examined, and the time-order error is discussed. The three theories are compared in terms of their ability to incorporate the empirical data.