Abstract
Simultaneity judgement (SJ) is a temporal discrimination task in which the targets span an ultimately short time range (zero or not). Psychophysical studies suggest that SJ is adequate to probe the perceptual components of human time processing in pure form. Thus far, time-relevant neural correlates for tactile SJ are unclear. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of tactile SJ using tactile number judgement as a time-irrelevant control task. As our main result, we demonstrated that the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is an SJ-specific region. The right IPL was detected by both parametric and non-parametric statistical analyses, and its activation intensity fulfilled a strict statistical criterion. In addition, we observed that some left-dominant regions (e.g., the striatum) were specifically activated by successive stimuli during SJ. Meanwhile, no region was specifically activated by simultaneous stimuli during SJ. Accordingly, we infer that the neural process for tactile SJ is as follows: the striatum estimates the time interval between tactile stimuli; based on this interval, the right IPL discriminates the successiveness or simultaneity of the stimuli. Moreover, taking detailed behavioural results into account, we further discuss possible concurrent or alternative mechanisms that can explain the fMRI results.
Highlights
In the SJ task, the participants were required to judge whether the onsets of the left and right stimuli were simultaneous
In the NJ task, the participants were required to judge whether the number of pins of the left and right stimuli were the same
We further discussed possible concurrent or alternative mechanisms that could explain our fMRI results, taking into account the detailed behavioural results, including the factors of stimulus coincidence (same/different) and features (time/ numbers)
Summary
Thirty-two healthy individuals (27 males, 5 females; mean age: 21.9 years; age range: 18–33 years) participated in the present study. Two because they frequently slept during the tasks and one because the participant exhibited an accuracy rate for NJ of approximately 0.5 (i.e., chance level). Two of the authors of this manuscript were included in the 32 participants. None of the participants had any neurological, psychiatric, or other medical problems at the time of the experiment. All participants were right-handed according to the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (laterality quotient: 0.90 ± 0.18)
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