Single trial beta oscillations index time estimation

Tadeusz W Kononowicz,Hedderik Van Rijn

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.06.014

Abstract

Recent work shows that putamen-originating beta power oscillations serve as a carrier for temporal information during tapping tasks, with higher beta power associated with longer temporal reproductions. However, given the nature of tapping tasks, it is difficult to determine whether beta power dynamics observed in these tasks are linked to the generation or execution of motor programs or to the internal representation of time. To assess whether recent findings in animals generalize to human studies we reanalyzed existing EEG data of participants who estimated a 2.5s time interval with self-paced onset and offset keypresses. The results showed that the trial-to-trial beta power measured after the onset predicts the produced duration, such that higher beta power indexes longer produced durations. Moreover, although beta power measured before the first key-press also influenced the estimated interval, it did so independently from post-first-keypress beta power. These results suggest that initial motor inhibition plays an important role in interval production, and that this inhibition can be interpreted as a biased starting point of the decision processes involved in time estimation.

Highlights

Perceiving the passage of time is an ubiquitous experience and a building block for other cognitive processes and behaviors such as controlling movements in time (Allman et al, 2014; van Wassenhove, 2009), both in well-controlled laboratory settings (Van et al, 2014) and in tasks with higher external validity (Matthews and Meck, 2014; Van Rijn, 2014)
According to Bartolo et al's recent study (2014; see Bartolo and Merchant (2015)) in monkeys, beta power originating from the putamen may index temporal durations, such that bigger beta power coincides with longer durations between consecutive taps
We tested whether this effect extends to interval timing in humans in a reproduction paradigm while controlling for a number of potential artifacts and explicitly tested whether both prefirst-keypress and post-first-keypress beta power contribute to this effect

Summary

Introduction

Perceiving the passage of time is an ubiquitous experience and a building block for other cognitive processes and behaviors such as controlling movements in time (Allman et al, 2014; van Wassenhove, 2009), both in well-controlled laboratory settings (Van et al, 2014) and in tasks with higher external validity (Matthews and Meck, 2014; Van Rijn, 2014). It has been convincingly shown that climbing neural activity (CNA, Durstewitz, 2003) is somehow linked to time estimation (e.g., Macar and Vidal, 2004; Wiener et al, 2012; Wittmann, 2013), previous studies have found that EEG-based CNA does not co-vary with trial-to-trial fluctuations in subjective timing (Kononowicz and Van Rijn, 2011; Van Rijn et al, 2011, cf., Wiener et al, 2012) whereas electrophysiological potentials evoked by the end of the interval do covary with the subjective percept Kononowicz and van Rijn (2014a). Post-interval evoked potentials cannot be used to track or index the dynamics of subjective time The dynamics of neural oscillations has been investigated very rarely (but see Kononowicz (2015), Parker et al (2014))

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