scholarly journals Temporal Encoding: Relative and absolute representations of time guide behavior

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Başak Akdoğan ◽  
Amita Wanar ◽  
Benjamin Kyle Gersten ◽  
Charles Randy Gallistel ◽  
Peter Balsam
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Discrimination ◽  
Duration Discrimination ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Discrimination Ability ◽  
Extensive Training ◽  
Discrimination Procedure ◽  
Directed Action ◽  
Temporal Encoding ◽  
Relational Control

Temporal information-processing is critical for adaptive behavior and goal-directed action. It is thus crucial to understand how the temporal distance between behaviorally relevant events is encoded to guide behavior. However, research on temporal representations has yielded mixed findings as to whether organisms utilize relative versus absolute judgments of time intervals. To address this fundamental question about the timing mechanism, we tested mice in a duration discrimination procedure in which they learned to correctly categorize tones of different durations as short or long. After being trained on a pair of target intervals the mice transferred to conditions in which cue durations and corresponding response locations were systematically manipulated. Specifically, responses and/or durations of cues were switched in different experimental phases so that either the relative or absolute mapping remained constant. The findings indicate that the transfer occurred most readily when relative relationships of durations and response locations were preserved. In contrast, when the animals had to re-map these relative relations, their temporal discrimination ability was impaired, and they required extensive training to re-establish temporal control. However, preserving the response location of one of the cue durations in such conditions was found to help with initial transfer. These results demonstrate that mice can represent experienced durations both as having a certain magnitude (absolute representation) and as being shorter or longer of the two durations (an ordinal relation to other cue durations), with relational control having a greater influence in temporal discriminations.

Timing, Storage, and Comparison of Stimulus Duration Engage Discrete Anatomical Components of a Perceptual Timing Network

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 2185-2197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer T. Coull ◽  
Bruno Nazarian ◽  
Franck Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Stimulus Duration ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Temporal Discrimination ◽  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Motor Preparation ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Temporal Encoding ◽  
Perceptual Timing ◽  
The Right

The temporal discrimination paradigm requires subjects to compare the duration of a probe stimulus to that of a sample previously stored in working or long-term memory, thus providing an index of timing that is independent of a motor response. However, the estimation process itself comprises several component cognitive processes, including timing, storage, retrieval, and comparison of durations. Previous imaging studies have attempted to disentangle these components by simply measuring brain activity during early versus late scanning epochs. We aim to improve the temporal resolution and precision of this approach by using rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to time-lock the hemodynamic response to presentation of the sample and probe stimuli themselves. Compared to a control (color-estimation) task, which was matched in terms of difficulty, sustained attention, and motor preparation requirements, we found selective activation of the left putamen for the storage (“encoding”) of stimulus duration into working memory (WM). Moreover, increased putamen activity was linked to enhanced timing performance, suggesting that the level of putamen activity may modulate the depth of temporal encoding. Retrieval and comparison of stimulus duration in WM selectively activated the right superior temporal gyrus. Finally, the supplementary motor area was equally active during both sample and probe stages of the task, suggesting a fundamental role in timing the duration of a stimulus that is currently unfolding in time.

Effects of Shape-Discrimination Training on the Selectivity of Inferotemporal Cells in Adult Monkeys

1998 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 324-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eucaly Kobatake ◽  
Gang Wang ◽  
Keiji Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
Discrimination Training ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Visual Object ◽  
Shape Discrimination ◽  
Discrimination Ability ◽  
Cell Responses ◽  
Extensive Training ◽  
Complex Shapes ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Area Te

Kobatake, Eucaly, Gang Wang, and Keiji Tanaka. Effects of shape-discrimination training on the selectivity of inferotemporal cells in adult monkeys. J. Neurophysiol. 80: 324–330, 1998. Through extensive training, humans can become “visual experts,” able to visually distinguish subtle differences among similar objects with greater ease than those who are untrained. To understand the neural mechanisms behind this acquired discrimination ability, adult monkeys were fully trained to discriminate 28 moderately complex shapes. The training effects on the stimulus selectivity of cells in area TE of the inferotemporal cortex were then examined in anesthetized preparations. Area TE represents a later stage of the ventral visual cortical pathway that is known to mediate visual object discrimination and recognition. The recordings from the trained monkeys and untrained controls showed that the proportion of TE cells responsive to some member of the 28 stimuli was significantly greater in the trained monkeys than that in the control monkeys. Cell responses recorded from the trained monkeys were not sharply tuned to single training stimuli, but rather broadly covered several training stimuli. The distances among the training stimuli in the response space spanned by responses of the recorded TE cells were significantly greater in the trained monkeys than those in the control monkeys. The subset of training stimuli to which individual cells responded differed from cell to cell with only partial overlaps, suggesting that the cells responded to features common to several stimuli. These results are consistent with a model in which visual expertise is acquired through the development of differential responses by inferotemporal cells to the images of relevant objects.

scholarly journals Sequential Temporal Discrimination in Humans and Mice

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filiz Çoşkun ◽  
Dilara Berkay ◽  
Zeynep Ceyda Sayalı ◽  
Fuat Balcı
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Discrimination ◽  
Discrimination Performance ◽  
Endogenous Timing ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Probabilistic Information ◽  
Units Of Analysis ◽  
Timing Uncertainty

Previous studies showed that humans and mice can maximize their rewards in two alternative temporal discrimination tasks by incorporating exogenous probabilities and endogenous timing uncertainty into their decisions. The current study investigated if the probabilistic relations modulated the temporal discrimination performance in scenarios with more than two temporal options. In order to address this question, we tested humans (Experiment 1) and mice (Experiment 2) in the dual-switch task, which required subjects to discriminate three time intervals (short, medium, and long durations) in a sequential fashion. The latencies of switches from short to medium and from medium to long option were the main units of analysis. The results revealed that the timing of switches between the first two options (short-to-medium) were sensitive to probabilistic information in both humans and mice. However, mice but not humans adapted the timing of their subsequent switches between the last two options (medium-to-long) based on the probabilistic information associated with these latter options. These results point at a suboptimal tendency in the temporal decisions of humans with multiple options.

Visual-auditory differences in duration discrimination depend on modality-specific, sensory-automatic temporal processing: Converging evidence for the validity of the Sensory-Automatic Timing Hypothesis

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (11) ◽  
pp. 2364-2377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Rammsayer ◽  
Stefan Pichelmann
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Processing ◽  
Temporal Discrimination ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Duration Discrimination ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Interval Duration ◽  
Specific Input ◽  
Timing System ◽  
Timing Hypothesis

The Sensory-Automatic Timing Hypothesis assumes visual-auditory differences in duration discrimination to originate from sensory-automatic temporal processing. Although temporal discrimination of extremely brief intervals in the range of tens-of-milliseconds is predicted to depend mainly on modality-specific, sensory-automatic temporal processing, duration discrimination of longer intervals is predicted to require more and more amodal, higher order cognitive resources and decreasing input from the sensory-automatic timing system with increasing interval duration. In two duration discrimination experiments with sensory modality as a within- and a between-subjects variable, respectively, we tested two decisive predictions derived from the Sensory-Automatic Timing Hypothesis: (1) visual-auditory differences in duration discrimination were expected to be larger for brief intervals in the tens-of-milliseconds range than for longer ones, and (2) visual-auditory differences in duration discrimination of longer intervals should disappear when statistically controlled for modality-specific input from the sensory-automatic timing system. In both experiments, visual-auditory differences in duration discrimination were larger for the brief than for the longer intervals. Furthermore, visual-auditory differences observed with longer intervals disappeared when statistically controlled for modality-specific input from the sensory-automatic timing system. Thus, our findings clearly confirmed the validity of the Sensory-Automatic Timing Hypothesis.

Timescale dependence in a conditional temporal discrimination procedure

2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliot A. Ludvig ◽  
Fuat Balci ◽  
Kristy M. Longpre
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Discrimination ◽  
Discrimination Procedure

scholarly journals Locally distributed abstraction of temporal distance in human parietal cortex

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qun Ye ◽  
Yi Hu ◽  
Yixuan Ku ◽  
Kofi Appiah ◽  
Sze Chai Kwok
Keyword(s):  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Episodic Event ◽  
Memory Network ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Representation Of Time

AbstractAn enduring puzzle in the neuroscience of memory is how the brain parsimoniously situates past events by their order in relation to time. By combining functional MRI, and representational similarity analysis, we reveal a multivoxel representation of time intervals separating pairs of episodic event-moments in the posterior medial memory system, especially when the events were experienced within a similar temporal context. We further show such multivoxel representations to be vulnerable to disruption through targeted repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and that perturbation to the mnemonic abstraction alters the neural—behavior relationship across the wider parietal memory network. Our findings establish a mnemonic “pattern-based” code of temporal distances in the human brain, a fundamental neural mechanism for supporting the temporal structure of past events, assigning the precuneus as a locus of flexibly effecting the manipulation of physical time during episodic memory retrieval.

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