A Time Duration Discrimination Task for the Study of Elapsed Time Processing in Rats

Duration discrimination in the range of milliseconds is essential for various aspects of behavior and individual differences. The present paper addresses important methodological issues, such as type of stimuli, type of task, method for threshold estimation, and temporal sensitivity of the psychophysical procedure, that should be borne in mind when developing a sensitive and reliable duration discrimination task. Furthermore, it introduces a psychophysical approach for the assessment of individual differences in duration discrimination of extremely brief intervals in the subsecond range. Monte Carlo simulations provide clear evidence that this task is sensitive enough to correctly detect a true difference between temporal stimuli as small as 2 ms with a high probability. Further, the distributional properties of individual performance scores obtained from 534 participants by means of the introduced duration discrimination task are presented.

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Response properties of monkey prefrontal neurons to visual and auditory cues in a duration discrimination task

Neuroscience Research ◽

10.1016/j.neures.2011.07.765 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 71 ◽

pp. e177

Author(s):

Atsushi Chiba ◽

Ken-ichi Oshio ◽

Masahiko Inase

Keyword(s):

Discrimination Task ◽

Duration Discrimination ◽

Auditory Cues ◽

Response Properties ◽

Duration Discrimination Task

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Neuronal activity in the monkey prefrontal cortex during a duration discrimination task with visual and auditory cues

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-97094-w ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Atsushi Chiba ◽

Kazunori Morita ◽

Ken-ichi Oshio ◽

Masahiko Inase

Keyword(s):

Prefrontal Cortex ◽

Neuronal Activity ◽

Visual Cues ◽

Discrimination Task ◽

Early Stage ◽

Duration Discrimination ◽

Visual Signals ◽

Final Decision ◽

Monkey Prefrontal Cortex ◽

Duration Discrimination Task

AbstractTo investigate neuronal processing involved in the integration of auditory and visual signals for time perception, we examined neuronal activity in prefrontal cortex (PFC) of macaque monkeys during a duration discrimination task with auditory and visual cues. In the task, two cues were consecutively presented for different durations between 0.2 and 1.8 s. Each cue was either auditory or visual and was followed by a delay period. After the second delay, subjects indicated whether the first or the second cue was longer. Cue- and delay-responsive neurons were found in PFC. Cue-responsive neurons mostly responded to either the auditory or the visual cue, and to either the first or the second cue. The neurons responsive to the first delay showed activity that changed depending on the first cue duration and were mostly sensitive to cue modality. The neurons responsive to the second delay exhibited activity that represented which cue, the first or second cue, was presented longer. Nearly half of this activity representing order-based duration was sensitive to cue modality. These results suggest that temporal information with visual and auditory signals was separately processed in PFC in the early stage of duration discrimination and integrated for the final decision.

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