Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 75, August 2015, Pages 381-389
Neuropsychologia

Single trial beta oscillations index time estimation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.06.014Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Using EEG we investigated oscillatory correlates of production of time intervals

  • Beta and theta power measured after the interval onset predicts the produced duration

  • Initial motor inhibition at interval onset alters the duration of produced intervals

Abstract

Recent work shows that putamen-originating beta power oscillations serve as a carrier for temporal information during tapping tasks, with higher beta power associated with longer temporal reproductions. However, given the nature of tapping tasks, it is difficult to determine whether beta power dynamics observed in these tasks are linked to the generation or execution of motor programs or to the internal representation of time. To assess whether recent findings in animals generalize to human studies we reanalyzed existing EEG data of participants who estimated a 2.5 s time interval with self-paced onset and offset keypresses. The results showed that the trial-to-trial beta power measured after the onset predicts the produced duration, such that higher beta power indexes longer produced durations. Moreover, although beta power measured before the first key-press also influenced the estimated interval, it did so independently from post-first-keypress beta power. These results suggest that initial motor inhibition plays an important role in interval production, and that this inhibition can be interpreted as a biased starting point of the decision processes involved in time estimation.

Keywords

Beta power oscillations
Interval timing
Dopamine
Inhibition

Cited by (0)

1

Contributions: designed research, performed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper.

2

Contributions: designed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper.