Abstract
Compared to our understanding of the functional maturation of executive functions, little is known about the neurofunctional development of perceptive functions. Time perception develops during late adolescence, underpinning many functions including motor and verbal processing, as well as late maturing higher order cognitive skills such as forward planning and future-related decision making. Nothing, however, is known about the neurofunctional changes associated with time perception from childhood to adulthood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging we explored the effects of age on the brain activation and functional connectivity of 32 male participants from 10 to 53 years of age during a time discrimination task that required the discrimination of temporal intervals of seconds differing by several hundred milliseconds. Increasing development was associated with progressive activation increases within left lateralized dorsolateral and inferior fronto-parieto-striato-thalamic brain regions. Furthermore, despite comparable task performance, adults showed increased functional connectivity between inferior/dorsolateral interhemispheric fronto-frontal activation as well as between inferior fronto-parietal regions compared with adolescents. Activation in caudate, specifically, was associated with both increasing age and better temporal discrimination. Progressive decreases in activation with age were observed in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, limbic regions, and cerebellum. The findings demonstrate age-dependent developmentally dissociated neural networks for time discrimination. With increasing age there is progressive recruitment of later maturing left hemispheric and lateralized fronto-parieto-striato-thalamic networks, known to mediate time discrimination in adults, while earlier developing brain regions such as ventromedial prefrontal cortex, limbic and paralimbic areas, and cerebellum subserve fine-temporal processing functions in children and adolescents.
Highlights
Temporal perception of relatively brief durations in the range of seconds and milliseconds is integral to motor and verbal function as well as speed of cognitive processing
BRAIN ACTIVATION Head motion No subject demonstrated head motion exceeding a cut-off of 1 voxel and no significant correlations were observed between age and mean head motion
Across all subjects, time discrimination of second durations differing by several hundred milliseconds was associated with activation within bilateral fronto-striato-parietal regions
Summary
Temporal perception of relatively brief durations in the range of seconds and milliseconds is integral to motor and verbal function as well as speed of cognitive processing. There is evidence that temporal processes in different time domains are closely interrelated and developmental changes in temporal processing abilities in the milliseconds temporal range may be associated with developmental changes in other temporal processing skills These include the ability to process longer durations of several seconds or more (Rozek et al, 1977; Block et al, 1999; Droit-Volet and Wearden, 2001; Szelag et al, 2002) as well as other cognitive functions requiring temporal processing in other time domains such as temporal discounting, requiring temporal foresight (Steinberg et al, 2009), all skills which will contribute to an extended and deeper temporal perspective in late adolescence (Greene, 1986). The majority of developmental functional imaging studies have focused upon late developing executive functions, showing linear progressive age-associated increases in activation in frontal, striatal, and parietal brain regions during tasks of cognitive control (Rubia et al, 2000, 2006, 2007, 2010; Adleman et al, 2002; Bunge et al, 2002; Booth et al, 2003; Konrad et al, 2005; Marsh et al, 2006; Christakou et al, 2009b, 2011; Smith et al, 2011)
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