2026-01-09 ゲーテ大学
<関連情報>
- https://aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de/english/brain-research-how-we-predict-the-immediate-future/
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2518982123
差し迫った出来事の予期は時間スケールに依存しない The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant
Matthias Grabenhorst, David Poeppel, and Georgios Michalareas
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Published:January 7, 2026
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2518982123
Significance
From everyday conversation to sports, to traffic, to music, people constantly predict when events will happen so they can prepare their next actions. This study examines how the brain makes such timing predictions over short periods of a few seconds. Using experiments with vision and audition, along with models of reaction times, we found that people rely on the same underlying calculation regardless of the time scale: They estimate the probability of an event over time. This process drives anticipation and determines how precise anticipation is, consistently across time scales. Our results suggest that this scale invariance is a basic principle of how humans anticipate events in time—a core function that supports many aspects of thought and behavior.
Abstract
Humans predict the timing of imminent events to generate fast and precise actions, decisions, and other behaviors. Such temporal anticipation is critical over wide timescales, and especially salient over the range from hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds. Despite advances in our understanding of basic timing behavior and its underlying neural mechanisms, it remains an open question whether anticipation is stable across these short time scales. Recent work shows that the brain models the probability density function (PDF) of events across time, suggesting a canonical mechanism for temporal anticipation. Here, we investigate whether this computation holds when the event distribution covers different time spans. We show that, irrespective of the time span, anticipation, measured as reaction time, scales with the event distribution. This demonstrates that the key computation—the estimation of event probability density—is invariant across temporal scales. We further show that the precision of anticipation is also scale invariant which contradicts Weber’s law. The results are established in vision and audition, suggesting that the core computations in temporal anticipation are independent of sensory modality. Perceptual systems exploit probability estimation over time independently of temporal scale to anticipate imminent events.
