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J Neurophysiol (December 19, 2007). doi:10.1152/jn.01225.2007
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Submitted on November 5, 2007
Accepted on December 17, 2007

Do we have a common mechanism for measuring time in the hundreds of millisecond range? Evidence from multiple interval timing tasks

Hugo Merchant1*, Wilbert Zarco1, and Luis Prado2

1 Cognitive Neuroscience, Instituto de Neurobiologia, Queretaro, Queretaro, Mexico
2 Queretaro, Queretaro, Mexico; Cognitive Neuroscience, Instituto de Neurobiologia, Queretaro, Queretaro, Mexico

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: merch006{at}umn.edu.

In the present study we examined the performance variability of a group of thirteen subjects in eight different tasks that involved the processing of temporal intervals in the subsecond range. These tasks differed in their sensorimotor processing (S; perception vs production), the modality of the stimuli used to define the intervals (M; auditory vs visual), and the number of intervals (N; one or four). Different analytical techniques were used in order to determine the existence of a central or distributed timing mechanism across tasks. The results showed a linear increase in performance variability as a function of the interval duration in all tasks. However, this compliance of the scalar property of interval timing was accompanied by a strong effect of S, N, M, and the interaction between these variables on the subjects’ temporal accuracy. Thus, the performance variability was larger in perceptual than in motor-timing tasks, was also larger using visual rather than auditory stimuli, and decreased as a function of the number of intervals. These results suggest the existence of a partially overlapping distributed mechanism underlying the ability to quantify time in different contexts.




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