Neural pattern change during encoding of a narrative predicts retrospective duration estimates

Abstract
Data availability
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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

The following data sets were generated

(2016) Neural pattern change during encoding of a narrative predicts retrospective duration estimates
Publicly available at the Princeton dataspace.

http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp011n79h6771

Article and author information

Author details

Olga Lositsky

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

For correspondence
lositsky@princeton.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7089-4474
Janice Chen

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Daniel Toker

Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Christopher J Honey

Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Michael Shvartsman

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Jordan L Poppenk

Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3315-5098
Uri Hasson

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Kenneth A Norman

Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States

For correspondence
knorman@princeton.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

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

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.