Episode Ep 130 June 30, 2026 1 min 18s

Behavioral Theory of Timing and Poisson Processes

From Human Factors Minute Human Factors Cast

The Behavioral Theory of Timing comes to us from Peter Killeen and Gregor Fetterman in 1988. The general idea is that the reinforcement of behaviors generates knowledge of the average amount of time between reinforcement. This knowledge is what sets our internal clock, which then tells us when to perform the behavior. The transitions between behaviors are considered a Poisson Process.

A Poisson Process is a probability concept that can be applied to many real-world situations. For something to qualify as a Poisson Process, events must be independent of each other, the average rate of events is constant, and two events cannot occur at the same time. For example, we can think of how often a website will go down in a given time period or how often customers will call a help center.

Back to our Behavioral Theory of Timing! This model of timing is a formalization of the concept that behavior is the mediator of temporal control, linking it to the behaviorist movement in psychology that began in the early 1900s. Like other theories of timing, the Behavioral Theory of Timing posits that we have a pacemaker-accumulator system, or that an oscillator of some type generates pulses that are summed by a hypothetical "accumulator." Variations in timing accuracy are explained as errors from the pacemaker or accumulator.

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