Neural Correlates of Subsecond Time Distortion in the Middle Temporal Area of Visual Cortex

摘要

How does the brain represent the passage of time at the subsecondnscale? Although different conceptual models for time perceptionnhave been proposed, its neurophysiological basis remainsnunknown. We took advantage of a visual duration illusion producednby stimulus novelty to link changes in cortical activity innmonkeys with distortions of duration perception in humans.nWe found that human subjects perceived the duration of a subsecondnmotion pulse with a novel direction longer than a motionnpulse with a repeated direction. Recording frommonkeys viewingnidentical motion stimuli but performing a different behavioralntask, we found that both the duration and amplitude of the neuralnresponse in the middle temporal area of visual cortex were positivelyncorrelated with the degree of novelty of the motion direction.nIn contrast to previous accounts that attribute distortions innduration perception to changes in the speed of a putative internalnclock, our results suggest that the known adaptive properties ofnneural activity in visual cortex contributes to subsecond temporalndistortions.