Mechanisms of perceptual timing: Beat-based or interval-based judgements

Summary. What is the nature of the human timing mecha-nism for perceptual judgements about short temporal in-tervals? One possibility is that initial periodic events, such as tones, establish internal beats which continue after the external events and serve as reference points for the per-ception of subsequent events. A second possibility is that the timer records the intervals produced by events. Later, the stored intervals can be reproduced or compared to other intervals. A study by Schulze (1978) provided evi-dence favoring beat-based timing. In contrast, our two ex-periments upport an interval theory. The judgements of intervals between tones is not improved when the events are synchronized with internal beats established by the ini-tial intervals. The conflict between the two sets of results may be resolved by the fact that an interval timer can recy