ABSTRACT
When a signal of some duration is presented to an animal, what does the animal perceive as its duration? It is common in sensory psychophysics to postulate a subjective scale with scale values and variance properties so that in some sense, what the animal perceives is a position on the y axis of the graph relating subjective time to physical time. This is a value that may be temporarily stored in a working memory. If food is delivered for a response after a signal of one duration, and not others, what does the animal remember? Presumably, some representation of the value stored in working memory is transferred to a more permanent reference memory. After the presentation of a signal of some duration, how does the animal decide whether or not to respond? Presumably, a comparison is made between a current experience of a duration in working memory and a remembered value in reference memory. The purpose of this chapter is to develop an information processing model of timing along these lines that is compatible with experimental results. The development focuses particularly upon where, in the course of perceiving and discriminating time, variability arises.
