Dichotomy in perceptual learning of interval timing: calibration of mean accuracy and precision differ in specificity and time course

Our brain is inexorably confronted with a dynamic environment in which it has to fine-tune spatiotemporal representations of incoming sensory stimuli and commit to a decision accordingly. Among those representations needing constant calibration is interval timing, which plays a pivotal role in various cognitive and motor tasks. To investigate how perceived time interval is adjusted by experience, we conducted a human psychophysical experiment using an implicit interval-timing task in which observers responded to an invisible bar drifting at a constant speed. We tracked daily changes in distributions of response times for a range of physical time intervals over multiple days of training with two major types of timing performance, mean accuracy and precision. We found a decoupled dynamics of mean accuracy and precision in terms of their time course and specificity of perceptual learning. Mean accuracy showed feedback-driven instantaneous calibration evidenced by a partial transfer around the time interval t...