What do waiting for your morning toast, waiting for a red light to turn green, and tensing up just at the end of the regular “3, 2, 1…” countdown in a race have in common? In all these scenarios, your brain is anticipating the exact moment in time when you should act. This skill is called temporal preparation: our capacity to predict when something will happen so that we can be ready in time.
Psychologists have been fascinated by this ability for more than a century, with pioneering work dating back to the early 1900s. In recent decades, interest has increased, and different laboratory tasks are now commonly used to capture temporal preparation effects, such as foreperiod tasks, temporal orienting tasks and rhythmic tasks. These tasks all show a similar pattern: when we can anticipate the moment of an event, our reactions become faster and more accurate. However, they sometimes yield different results, suggesting that each type of temporal preparation task taps into slightly different mechanisms. This makes it difficult to obtain a complete picture of temporal preparation.
In a recent study, a group of researchers tackled this issue by creating a single, unified tool: the Temporal Preparation Task (TEP-Task). In this task, different temporal preparation effects are measured in separate blocks, while everything else remains constant: the same stimuli, the same procedure and the same setting. This means researchers can directly compare several forms of temporal preparation within about 35 minutes in a single session. The TEP-Task is not only practical for quick assessments; it also opens up new possibilities for studying how temporal preparation works in different groups, such as children, older adults, or clinical populations.
The project is the result of an international collaboration among four researchers based in Spain, France, Italy and Switzerland. With the TEP-Task, the researchers hope to bring the field a step closer to answering one of the most intriguing questions in cognitive neuroscience: how does the brain anticipate the right time?
Reference
Capizzi, M., Attout, L., Mioni, G., & Charras, P. (2026). Unifying temporal preparation: The temporal preparation task (TEP-Task). Behavior Research Methods, 58(2), 52. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02908-8
Contact
Maríagrazia Capizzi - @email