Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Temporal preparation is influenced by the distributions of foreperiod durations, as reflected in differences in foreperiod _ reaction time (RT) curves. Recently, it has been shown that initiating foreperiods with voluntary actions influences temporal preparation. Here, we investigated whether this effect of actions on preparation is related to differences in learning of foreperiod distributions when intervals are self-initiated. Participants indicated the orientations of Gabors preceded by foreperiods with variable durations. Foreperiods were initiated with a voluntary keypress (action condition) or automatically, after a random interval (external condition). Across eight blocks, we manipulated the distributions of foreperiods. RT curves showed that participants learned the distributions in both conditions. However, in the external condition, learning was restricted to the first blocks, whereas in the action condition participants adapted to the changing distributions across the whole experiment. We discuss the implication of these results for the relationship between actions and temporal cognition.