ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Two sources of uncertainty independently modulate temporal expectancy.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Timing of Attentional Distraction Matters in Facilitating Extinction of Trace Fear Memory.Experimental neurobiology · 2026Article
- The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- What is prepared in temporal preparation? A review and a historical appreciation.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Sequential temporal anticipation characterized by neural power modulation and in recurrent neural networks.eLife · 2025Article
- Human brain integrates both unconditional and conditional timing statistics to guide expectation and behavior.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Temporal attention and oculomotor effects dissociate distinct types of temporal expectation.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Temporal context modulates the recovery of the attentional blink.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Neural signatures of temporal anticipation in human cortex represent event probability density.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Readiness for Perception and Action: Towards a More Mechanistic Understanding of Phasic Alertness.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- When temporal attention interacts with expectation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Ramping dynamics and theta oscillations reflect dissociable signatures during rule-guided human behavior.Nature communications · 2024Article
- What is a Rhythm for the Brain? The Impact of Contextual Temporal Variability on Auditory Perception.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- How Does Temporal Blurring Alter Movement Timing?eNeuro · 2023Article
- Underestimation in temporal numerosity judgments computationally explained by population coding model.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The environment is shaped by two sources of temporal uncertainty: the discrete probability of whether an event will occur and-if it does-the continuous probability of when it will happen. These two types of uncertainty are fundamental to every form of anticipatory behavior including learning, decision-making, and motor planning. It remains unknown how the brain models the two uncertainty parameters and how they interact in anticipation. It is commonly assumed that the discrete probability of whether an event will occur has a fixed effect on event expectancy over time. In contrast, we first demonstrate that this pattern is highly dynamic and monotonically increases across time. Intriguingly, this behavior is independent of the continuous probability of when an event will occur. The effect of this continuous probability on anticipation is commonly proposed to be driven by the hazard rate (HR) of events. We next show that the HR fails to account for behavior and propose a model of event expectancy based on the probability density function of events. Our results hold for both vision and audition, suggesting independence of the representation of the two uncertainties from sensory input modality. These findings enrich the understanding of fundamental anticipatory processes and have provocative implications for many aspects of behavior and its neural underpinnings.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.