Psychophysical dissection of temporal error monitoring

Abstract

The recent line of research robustly demonstrated that humans and rodents can keep track of the magnitude and direction of timing errors, composing a temporal error monitoring ability (TEM). However, the degree of dissociation between these two measures of TEM has not been investigated at the level of the underlying mental magnitude metrics. Specifically, we do not know whether the two behavioral manifestations of TEM differentially rely on subjective vs. objective time, whether the discriminability of time intervals relies on ratio and absolute differences, respectively. To this end, we first tested whether behavioral manifestations of TEM depend on relative (cognitive timing) or absolute timing errors (sensorimotor timing). In light of our earlier findings showing differential metacognitive processing of timing errors as a function of different levels of agency, we also tested whether the potential information processing differences in TEM measures differ across different levels of agency of timing errors? In two different datasets, we found that magnitude and direction monitoring of timing errors relied on the absolute (i.e., arithmetic/linear) and relative (i.e., ratio) distances, respectively. These effects were more pronounced for owned versus unowned errors for timing error magnitude monitoring and timing error direction monitoring, respectively. Together, this study demonstrated that the timing error direction monitoring relies more on cognitive timing, whereas error magnitude monitoring relies more on sensorimotor timing. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.