Flexible timing by temporal scaling of cortical responses
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s41593-017-0028-6.pdf
Description
Published version
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11.33 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
86c1cd684ad87197f4470247f2681187
Author(s)
Wang, Jing
Narain, Devika
Hosseini, Eghbal A.
Jazayeri, Mehrdad
Date Issued
December 2017
Journal
Nature Neuroscience
Publisher
Springer Nature
Citation
Wang, Jing, et al. “Flexible Timing by Temporal Scaling of Cortical Responses.” Nature Neuroscience 21, 1 (January 2018): 102–10. © 2017 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Musicians can perform at different tempos, speakers can control the cadence of their speech, and children can flexibly vary their temporal expectations of events. To understand the neural basis of such flexibility, we recorded from the medial frontal cortex of nonhuman primates trained to produce different time intervals with different effectors. Neural responses were heterogeneous, nonlinear, and complex, and they exhibited a remarkable form of temporal invariance: firing rate profiles were temporally scaled to match the produced intervals. Recording from downstream neurons in the caudate and from thalamic neurons projecting to the medial frontal cortex indicated that this phenomenon originates within cortical networks. Recurrent neural network models trained to perform the task revealed that temporal scaling emerges from nonlinearities in the network and that the degree of scaling is controlled by the strength of external input. These findings demonstrate a simple and general mechanism for conferring temporal flexibility upon sensorimotor and cognitive functions.
MIT Department
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41593-017-0028-6
