UBIQUITY OF SCALAR TIMING WITH A POISSON CLOCK

A Poisson pacemaker/accumulator system for perceiving and remembering time is studied. It is shown that were the Poisson process the only source of variance, the distribution of estimates of a remembered time would follow a compound gamma law. However, when multiplicative, mnemonic variance is introduced via encoding and retrieval constants, the scalar property is induced and dominates other sources of variance which may be present but invisible. © 1992.