Stefan Glasauer, Zhuanghua Shi
In 1868, Karl Vierordt discovered one type of errors in time perception?an overestimation of short duration and underestima-tion of long durations, known as Vierordt?s law. Here we reviewed the original study in its historical context and asked whether Vierordt?slaw is a result of an unnatural experimental randomization protocol. Using iterative Bayesian updating, we simulated the original resultswith high accuracy. Importantly, the model also predicted that a slowly changing random-walk sequence produces less central tendency than a random sequence with the same durations. This was validated by a duration reproduction experiment from two sequences (randomand random walk) with the same sampled distribution. The results showed that trial-wise variation influenced the magnitude of Vierordt?slaw. We concluded that Vierordt?s law is caused by an unnatural yet widely used experimental protocol
- rep_randwalk.mat - experimental data of duration reproduction.
- data_fit_paper.m - simulate and fit the experimental data
- fitdata1pv.m and kmodel1pv.m - optimization functions
Glasauer, S., & Shi, Z. (2021). The origin of Vierordt?s law: The experimental protocol matters. PsyCh Journal, pchj.464. https://doi.org/10.1002/pchj.464