Relative timing: from behaviour to neurons.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Neurobiology
• Psychophysics

Background:

• Processing temporal information is fundamental for guiding behavior.
• Relative timing involves making ordinal comparisons between event occurrences.
• This process can be implicit in brain computations or an explicit conscious judgment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review the phenomenology and mechanisms of relative timing.
• To explore the neural basis of temporal order judgments (TOJs).
• To propose an updated computational model for relative timing.

Main Methods:

• Review of psychophysical measurements, human neurophysiological and imaging studies, and neuropsychological data.
• Investigation of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) interventions.
• Development of a computational model based on evidence integration to a decision threshold.

Main Results:

• Evidence implicates the parietal cortex in relative timing.
• An updated race model, integrating sensory evidence towards a decision threshold, is proposed.
• The model facilitates identifying brain regions involved in relative timing through neural activity and TOJ correlations.

Conclusions:

• The parietal cortex plays a significant role in relative timing.
• An evidence integration model offers a refined understanding of neural timing mechanisms.
• This framework can be applied to investigate temporal processing in both humans and animals.