New paper! (Grabenhorst et al., PNAS, 2026)

New paper led by Matthias!

Grabenhorst M, Poeppel D, Michalareas G (2026). The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Available here.

From everyday conversation to sports, to traffic, to music, people constantly predict when events will happen so they can prepare their next actions. This study examines how the brain makes such timing predictions over short periods of a few seconds. Using experiments with vision and audition, along with models of reaction times, we found that people rely on the same underlying calculation regardless of the time scale: They estimate the probability of an event over time. This process drives anticipation and determines how precise anticipation is, consistently across time scales. Our results suggest that this scale invariance is a basic principle of how humans anticipate events in time—a core function that supports many aspects of thought and behavior.