A heterogeneous population code for elapsed time in rat medial agranular cortex

摘要

The neural mechanisms underlying the temporal control of behavior are largely unknown. Here we recorded from the medial agranular cortex in rats trained to respond on a temporal production procedure for probabilistically available food reward. Due to variability in estimating the time of food availability, robust responding typically bracketed the expected duration, starting some time before and ending some time after the signaled delay. This response period provided an analytic “steady-state” window during which the subject actively timed their behavior. Remarkably, during these response periods, a variety of firing patterns were seen which could be broadly described as ramps, peaks, and dips, with different slopes, directions, and times at which maxima or minima occur. Regularized linear discriminant analysis indicated that these patterns provided sufficiently reliable information to discriminate the elapsed duration of responding within these response periods. Modeling this across neuron variability showed that the utilization of ramps, dips, and peaks with different slopes and minimal/maximal rates at different times led to a substantial improvement in temporal prediction errors, suggesting that heterogeneity in the neural representation of elapsed time may facilitate temporally controlled behavior.