Abstract
We used voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) to determine which brain areas are necessary for discriminating time intervals above and below 1 s. VLSM compares behavioral scores of patients that have damage to a given voxel to those that do not on a voxel-by-voxel basis to determine which voxels are critical for the given behavior. Forty-seven subjects with unilateral hemispheric lesions performed a temporal discrimination task in which a standard stimulus was compared on each trial to a test stimulus. In different blocks of trials, standard stimuli were either 600 or 2000 ms. Behavioral measures included the point of subjective equality, a measure of accuracy, and the coefficient of variation, a measure of variability. Lesions of the right middle and inferior frontal gyri were associated with decrements in performance on both durations. In addition, lesions of the left temporal lobe and right precentral gyrus were associated exclusively with impaired performance for subsecond stimuli. In line with results from other studies, these data suggest that different circuits are necessary for timing intervals in these ranges, and that right frontal areas are particularly important to timing.
Highlights
There has been a surge of interest in the cognitive neuroscience of time perception over the past decade
voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) ANALYSIS 600 ms interval In the analysis for the coefficient of variation (CV) measure significant voxels were found in the right precentral gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (BA 44, 925 voxels)
These data are in line with previous suggestions that there may be specific cortical regions that are influential in the computation of time
Summary
There has been a surge of interest in the cognitive neuroscience of time perception over the past decade. Models of timing such as striatal beat frequency (SBF; Matell and Meck, 2004) suggest that cortex may be crucial to interval timing. On this account, input from cortical neurons is integrated by spiny neurons in the striatum to encode a remembered duration. Different structures (Lewis and Miall, 2003; Wiener et al, 2010b) and neurotransmitters (Rammsayer, 1999, 2001; Wiener et al, 2011) have been proposed to support these two functions, the degree to which routines involved in sub- and suprasecond timing are distinct remains unclear (e.g., Macar et al, 2002). One reason for the persistent controversy is that few studies of timing have assessed both sub- and suprasecond intervals (e.g., Harrington et al, 1998; Hinton and Meck, 2004; Shih et al, 2009)
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