The origin of Vierordt's law: The experimental protocol matters
Stefan Glasauer, Zhuanghua Shi
Abstract
In 1868, Karl Vierordt discovered one type of errors in time perception-an overestimation of short duration and underestimation of long durations, known as Vierordt's law. Here we reviewed the original study in its historical context and asked whether Vierordt's law is a result of an unnatural experimental randomization protocol. Using iterative Bayesian updating, we simulated the original results with high accuracy. Importantly, the model also predicted that a slowly changing random-walk sequence produces less central tendency than a random sequence with the same durations. This was validated by a duration reproduction experiment from two sequences (random and random walk) with the same sampled distribution. The results showed that trial-wise variation influenced the magnitude of Vierordt's law. We concluded that Vierordt's law is caused by an unnatural yet widely used experimental protocol.