Interval timing: Modelling the break-run-break pattern using start/stop threshold-less drift–diffusion model

Animal interval timing is often studied through the peak interval (PI) procedure. In this procedure, the animal is rewarded for the first response after a fixed delay from the stimulus onset, but on some trials, the stimulus remains and no reward is given. The standard methods and models to analyse the response pattern describe it as break-run-break, a period of low rate response followed by rapid responding, followed by a low rate of response. The study of the pattern has found correlations between start, stop, and duration of the run period that hold across species and experiments.

It is commonly assumed that to achieve the statistics with a pacemaker accumulator model, it is necessary to have start and stop thresholds. In this paper, we will develop a new model that varies response rate in relation to the likelihood of event occurrence, as opposed to a threshold, for changing the response rate. The new model reproduced the start and stop statistics that have been observed in 14 different PI experiments from 3 different papers. The developed model is also compared to the two-threshold Time-adaptive Drift–diffusion Model (TDDM), and the latest accumulator model subsuming the scalar expectancy theory (SET) on all 14 datasets. The results show that it is unnecessary to have explicit start and stop thresholds or an internal equivalent to break-run-break states to reproduce the individual trials statistics, the average behaviour, and the break-run-break analysis results. The new model also produces more realistic individual trials compared to TDDM.