Preface: SQAB 2012: Timing

Abstract

This special issue of Behavioral Processes reports the proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior (SQAB) held in Seattle, Washington May 24-26, 2012. The special issue focuses on research that examines the subjective experience of the passage of time. All papers make use of models and theories to frame their research and explanations. Internal clock models of various flavors help frame those discussions. Information processing based models such as 'Scalar Expectancy Theory' (SET; Gibbon, 1977) rely on assumptions about sources of error in a pacemaker-accumulator model of an internal clock. Others such as the 'Behavioral Theory of Timing' (BeT; Killeen and Fetterman, 1988) and 'Learning to Time' (LeT; Machado, 1997) place special emphasis on the role of behavior and associative processes in mediating timing. Other models do not posit pacemaker counter systems, such as the 'Attentional Allocation Model' (e.g., Zakay, 1993) which builds its explanations on assumptions about the competition for attentional resources between temporal and non-temporal tasks. 'Relative-Coding Hypothesis' holds that responding is controlled by the relative value of temporal samples (Molet and Zentall, 2008). The 'Striatal Beat Frequency Model' (e.g., Matell and Meck, 2000) offers a very different sort of model based on cortical activity. One thing in common between these models is that they are called on to help to explain timing behavior by providing a mechanism for action. The collection of papers in this special issue is noteworthy because of the diversity of models, methods, and species that have been used.