Neural pattern change during encoding of a narrative predicts retrospective duration estimates
- Princeton University, United States
- University of California, Berkeley, United States
- University of Toronto, Canada
- Queen's University, Canada
Abstract
What mechanisms support our ability to estimate durations on the order of minutes? Behavioral studies in humans have shown that changes in contextual features lead to overestimation of past durations. Based on evidence that the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex represent contextual features, we related the degree of fMRI pattern change in these regions with people's subsequent duration estimates. After listening to a radio story in the scanner, participants were asked how much time had elapsed between pairs of clips from the story. Our ROI analyses found that duration estimates were correlated with the neural pattern distance between two clips at encoding in the right entorhinal cortex. Moreover, whole-brain searchlight analyses revealed a cluster spanning the right anterior temporal lobe. Our findings provide convergent support for the hypothesis that retrospective time judgments are driven by 'drift' in contextual representations supported by these regions.
Data availability
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Neural pattern change during encoding of a narrative predicts retrospective duration estimatesPublicly available at the Princeton dataspace.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (Early Stage Investigator, R01-MH094480)
- Uri Hasson
John Templeton Foundation (Proposal 36751)
- Olga Lositsky
- Kenneth A Norman
National Institutes of Health (Training Grant, 2T32MH065214)
- Olga Lositsky
- Janice Chen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All parts of the experimental procedure were approved by the Princeton Institutional Review Board under Protocol #5516. All participants were screened to ensure no neurological or psychiatric disorders. Written informed consent, and consent to publish, was obtained for all participants in accordance with the Princeton Institutional Review Board regulations.
Copyright
© 2016, Lositsky et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Neural pattern change during encoding of a narrative predicts retrospective duration estimates
eLife 5:e16070.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16070
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