Why am I always late? Modeling the cognitive mechanisms underlying anticipatory timing under uncertainty

Responding to stimuli in a timely manner and anticipating the timing of future events both require us to internally track the passage of time. Models of timing on these tasks suggest that the subjective passage of time can be described as a noisy accumulation process driven by neural oscillations. In this paper, we show that the accuracy of these accumulators can be manipulated by occluding visual cues to the passage of time. Using a simple perceptual paradigm, we manipulate the total length of time that a stimulus must be tracked, the rate at which it moves, and the uncertainty that participants have about its position (length of occlusion). Participants consistently under-estimated the movement of the stimulus when it was occluded, corresponding to a drift rate in an accumulator model that was approximately half of what would be required to accurately track the passage of time. This results in consistently tardy anticipatory response times under uncertainty (Study 1) and an under-estimation of stimulus movement as it passes behind an occlusion (Study 2). Using a novel timing problems scale, we show that individual differences in model parameters representing subjective tracking of time under uncertainty predicted real-world difficulties managing time, tardiness, and procrastination.