How does the brain discriminate between stimulus durations?
Judging whether to stop or go through a yellow light requires determining the duration of the yellow light, and language users must produce sequences of syllables in a temporally structured manner: thus, the ability to tell time is critical. An emerging hypothesis is that local changes in neural activity can contain information about time in the subsecond range. Our data from in vitro experiments show that indeed local changes in intrinsic dynamics can represent time (Goel and Buonomano 2016).
To examine if similar local neural changes are utilized in a goal driven task, based on prior human experiments, we have designed a novel timing task for mice and show that mice learn to discriminate between two temporal patterns of audiovisual stimuli. By combining two photon calcium imaging with simple behavior, we are examining the neural mechanisms of timing which will also guide future therapies for timing deficits. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0047-23.2023
Mice can learn to discriminate between the audio-visual temporal patterns (Post et al 2023)
Divergence of neural trajectories during temporal pattern discrimination (Post et al 2023)