Warren Meck

Duke University | DU · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

Sprague-Dawley male rats were exposed to social defeat and subordination by aggressive Long-Evans male rats. The social defeat procedure involved the continuous exposure to an aggressive resident for 10 days, while living in a protective cage within the resident's home cage with daily brief confrontations. These stress experiences resulted in 1) re...

The contributions of cortico-cerebellar and cortico-striatal circuits to timing and time perception has often been a point of contention. In this review we propose that the cerebellum principally functions to reduce variability, through the detection of stimulus onsets and the sub-division of longer durations, thus contributing to both sub-second a...

Interval timing behavior and its sensitivity to both temporal context and changes in dopamine (DA) levels has recently received considerable attention. Nevertheless, the exact manner in which those interactions occur is far from clear. We examined temporal reproduction with feedback in the supra-seconds range as a function of DA levels using two we...

Temporal and social processing are intricately linked. The temporal extent and organization of interactional behaviors both within and between individuals critically determine interaction success. Conversely, social signals and social context influence time perception by altering subjective duration and making events seem “out of sync”. An "interna...

Animals can learn to repeat behaviors to earn desired rewards, a process commonly known as reinforcement learning. While previous work has implicated the ascending dopaminergic projections to the basal ganglia in reinforcement learning, little is known about the role of the hippocampus. Here we report that a specific population of hippocampal neuro...

Animals can learn to repeat behaviors to earn desired rewards, a process commonly known as reinforcement learning. While previous work has implicated the ascending dopaminergic projections to the basal ganglia in reinforcement learning, little is known about the role of the hippocampus. Here we report that a specific population of hippocampal neuro...

One of the major challenges for computational models of timing and time perception is to identify a neurobiological plausible implementation that predicts various behavioral properties, including the scalar property and retrospective timing. The available timing models primarily focus on the scalar property and prospective timing, while virtually i...

Durations are defined by a beginning and an end, and a major distinction is drawn between durations that start in the present and end in the future (‘prospective timing’) and durations that start in the past and end either in the past or the present (‘retrospective timing’). Different psychological processes are thought to be engaged in each of the...

The major tenets of beat-frequency/coincidence-detection models of reward-related timing are reviewed in light of recent behavioral and neurobiological findings. This includes the emphasis on a core timing network embedded in the motor system that is comprised of a corticothalamic-basal ganglia circuit. Therein, a central hub provides timing pulses...

Accurate and precise timing is crucial for complex and purposeful behaviors, such as foraging for food or playing a musical instrument. The brain is capable of processing temporal information in a coordinated manner, as if it contains an ‘internal clock’. Similar to the need for the brain to orient itself in space in order to understand its surroun...

The perception of time is critical to adaptive behavior. While prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia have been implicated in interval timing in the seconds to minutes range, little is known about the role of the mediodorsal thalamus (MD), which is a key component of the limbic cortico-basal ganglia- thalamocortical loop. In this study we tested the r...

A robust adaptation to environmental changes is vital for survival. Almost all living organisms have a circadian timing system that allows adjusting their physiology to cyclic variations in the surrounding environment. Among vertebrates, many birds are also seasonal species, adapting their physiology to annual changes in photoperiod (amplitude, len...

An integral component to the validity of timing models is their ability to accurately fit behavioral data from detection and discrimination tasks such as the temporal bisection procedure. Two of the most prominent timing models are the Sample Known Exactly (SKE), based on scalar timing theory, and the pseudo-logistic model (PLM). Recently, evidence...

The majority of studies in the field of timing and time perception have generally focused on sub- and supra-second time scales, specific behavioral processes, and/or discrete neuronal circuits. In an attempt to find common elements of interval timing from a broader perspective, we review the literature and highlight the need for cell and molecular...

Time perception is an essential element of conscious and subconscious experience, coordinating our perception and interaction with the surrounding environment. In recent years, major technological advances in the field of neuroscience have helped foster new insights into the processing of temporal information, including extending our knowledge of t...

Predictive timing requires a subject to learn the temporal relations between two stimuli in order to anticipate the second stimulus with an accurate and precise response as a function of successive of trials. A classic example of this being eye-blink conditioning, in which an auditory of visual conditioned stimulus (CS) predicts a future unconditio...

Ordinal comparison of successively presented signal durations requires a) the encoding of the first signal duration (standard), b) maintenance of temporal information specific to the standard duration in memory, and c) timing of the second signal duration (comparison) during which a comparison is made of the first and second durations. Rats were fi...

This chapter reviews recent human and nonhuman animal studies investigating neural signatures of time estimation. Investigation of the neural correlates of time estimation as measured by electrophysiology, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans and other animals has largely been fo...

Considerable evidence implicates the basal ganglia in interval timing, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Using a novel behavioral task, we demonstrate that head-fixed mice can be trained to show the key features of timing behavior within a few sessions. Single-trial analysis of licking behavior reveals stepping dynamics with v...

This chapter reviews recent human and non-human animal studies investigating neural signatures of time estimation. Investigation of the neural correlates of time estimation as measured by electrophysiology, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans and other animals has largely been focused...

eLS. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester. Temporal processing in the brain is fundamental to environmental adaptation in humans and other animals. Biological timing ranges from the microsecond scale (e.g., sound localisation) to seasonal frequencies (such as reproductive cycles). Two of the main scales of biological timing ubiquitous in most organis...

Humans and other animals can be shown to process temporal information as if they use an internal stopwatch that can be “run”, “paused”, and “reset” on command and whose speed of “ticking” is adjustable. In addition, interval-timing behavior can be separated into “clock”, “memory”, and “decision” stages of information processing such that one stage...

EEG and graph theory was used for investigating of functional brain connectivity in individuals who stutter and possible relation between their time perception deficit and functional brain network impairment was investigated.

Basic mechanisms of interval timing and associative learning are shared by many animal species, and develop quickly in early life, particularly across infancy, and childhood. Indeed, John Wearden in his book “The Psychology of Time Perception”, which is based on decades of his own research with colleagues, and which our commentary serves to primari...

Time is a universal psychological dimension, but time perception has often been studied and discussed in relative isolation. Increasingly, researchers are searching for unifying principles and integrated models that link time perception to other domains. In this review, we survey the links between temporal cognition and other psychological processe...

This review outlines the basic psychological and neurobiological processes associated with age-related distortions in timing and time perception in the hundredths of milliseconds-to-minutes range. The difficulty in separating indirect effects of impairments in attention and memory from direct effects on timing mechanisms is addressed. The main prem...

Although fear-producing treatments (e.g., electric shock) and pleasure-inducing treatments (e.g., methamphetamine) have different emotional valences, they both produce physiological arousal and lead to effects on timing and time perception that have been interpreted as reflecting an increase in speed of an internal clock. In this commentary, we rev...

Discriminative fear conditioning requires learning to dissociate between safety cues and cues that predict negative outcomes yet little is known about what processes contribute to discriminative fear learning. According to attentional models of time perception, processes that distract from timing result in temporal underestimation. If discriminativ...

The ability to decipher where one needs to be and when it is most beneficial to be there are fundamental to the success of an organism. Humans along with other animals are able to extract duration and temporal order from external as well as internal stimuli, though lacking a dedicated sensory organ for time. A plethora of studies have focused on do...

Performance on different psychophysical tasks measuring the sense of time indicates a large amount of individual variation in the accuracy and precision of timing in the hundredths of milliseconds-to-minutes range. Quantifying factors with an influence on timing is essential to isolating a biological (genetic) contribution to the perception and est...

Collapsing Analyses. Results from the gene-based collapsing analyses included in this study. (XLSX)

GWAS Analyses. Results from the GWAS analyses included in this study. (ZIP)

Phenotypes and Covariates. Phenotypic and covariate information for the samples included in this study. (XLSX)

Bilateral intratympanic sodium arsenate injections (100 mg/ml in isotonic saline) in adult male Long Evans rats produced impairments in allocentric navigation using a 12-arm radial maze procedure as well as a motor test battery designed to evaluate vestibular function. In contrast, no impairments in the accuracy or precision of duration reproductio...

Interval timing and working memory are critical components of cognition that are supported by neural oscillations in prefrontal-striatal-hippocampal circuits. In this review, the properties of interval timing and working memory are explored in terms of behavioral, anatomical, pharmacological, and neurophysiological findings. We then describe the va...

The journal Timing & Time Perception (Brill Publishers) was initiated with the realization that the study of ‘timing and time perception’ is growing exponentially with interest from fields as diverse as cognitive science, computer science, economics, philosophy, psychology, robotics, and neuroscience ... to name just a few. As with any scientific e...

The journal Timing & Time Perception (Brill Publishers) was initiated with the realization that the study of ‘timing and time perception’ is growing exponentially with interest from fields as diverse as cognitive science, computer science, economics, philosophy, psychology, robotics, and neuroscience ... to name just a few. As with any scientific e...

Immediate repetition of a stimulus reduces its apparent duration relative to a novel item. Recent work indicates that this may reflect suppressed cortical responses to repeated stimuli, arising from neural adaptation and/or the predictive coding of expected stimuli. This article summarizes recent behavioral and neurobiological studies linking perce...

The goal of our study was to characterize the relationship between intertemporal choice and interval timing, including determining how drugs that modulate brain serotonin and dopamine levels influence these two processes. In Experiment 1, rats were tested on a standard 40-s peak-interval procedure following administration of fluoxetine (3, 5, or 8m...

Scalar Timing Theory (an information-processing version of Scalar Expectancy Theory) and its evolution into the neurobiologically plausible Striatal Beat-Frequency (SBF) theory of interval timing are reviewed. These pacemaker/accumulator or oscillation/coincidence detection models are then integrated with the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (A...

Time perception is fundamental and heavily researched, but the field faces a number of obstacles to theoretical progress. In this advanced review, we focus on three pieces of ‘bad news’ for time perception research: temporal perception is highly labile across changes in experimental context and task; there are pronounced individual differences not...

Variations in both pitch and time are important in conveying meaning through speech and music, however, re- search is scant on perceptual interactions between these two domains. Using an ordinal comparison procedure, we explored how different pitch levels of ␣anker tones in␣uenced the perceived duration of empty interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Part...

Abstract Animals, including fish, birds, rodents, non-human primates, and pre-verbal infants are able to discriminate the duration and number of events without the use of language. In this paper, we present the results of six experiments exploring the capability of adult rats to count 2–6 sequentially presented white-noise stimuli. The investigatio...

Mice with cytotoxic lesions of the dorsal hippocampus (DH) underestimated 15 s and 45 s target durations in a bi-peak procedure as evidenced by proportional leftward shifts of the peak functions that emerged during training as a result of decreases in both 'start' and 'stop' times. In contrast, mice with lesions of the ventral hippocampus (VH) disp...

As time passes by, our own understanding of time is close to the truth. The brain is an efficient machine in orchestrating temporal information across a wide range of time scales. Remarkably, circadian and interval timing processes are shared phenomena across many species and behaviours. Moreover, timing is a pivotal biological function that suppor...

The overlap of neural circuits involved in episodic memory, relational learning, trace conditioning, and interval timing suggests the importance of hippocampal-dependent processes. Identifying the functional and neural mechanisms whereby the hippocampus plays a role in timing and decision-making, however, has been elusive. In this article we descri...

Humans share with other animals an ability to measure the passage of physical time and subjectively experience a sense of time passing. Subjective time has hallmark qualities, akin to other senses, which can be accounted for by formal, psychological, and neurobiological models of the internal clock. These include first-order principles, such as cha...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the feature of conscious life that scaffolds every act of cognition: subjective time. Our awareness of time and temporal properties is a constant feature of conscious life. Subjective temporality structures and guides every aspect of behavior and cognition, distinguishing memory, perception, and anticipation. This...

Precise timing is crucial to decision-making and behavioral control, yet subjective time can be easily distorted by various temporal contexts. Application of a Bayesian framework to various forms of contextual calibration reveals that, contrary to popular belief, contextual biases in timing help to optimize overall performance under noisy condition...

In 1984, there was considerable evidence that the hippocampus was important for spatial learning and some evidence that it was also involved in duration discrimination. The article "Hippocampus, Time, and Memory" (Meck, Church, & Olton, 1984), however, was the first to isolate the effects of hippocampal damage on specific stages of temporal process...

Five experiments were conducted to determine the effects of hippocampal damage on timing and the memory for temporal events. In Experiments 1-3, rats were trained to discriminate between auditory signals that differed in both duration (2 or 8 s) and rate (2 or 16 cycles/s). Half of the rats were trained to discriminate duration, and half were train...

Interval timing within the seconds-to-minutes range involves the interaction of the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia via dopaminergic-glutamatergic pathways. Because the secreted protein brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is able to modulate dopamine release as well as glutamatergic activity, we hypothesized that BDNF may be important for...

An emerging corpus of clinical and neuroimaging data suggests that subsecond and suprasecond durations are represented via 2 distinct mechanisms in humans; however, surprisingly, behavioral data to this effect are lacking. In our first experiment, we perform the first systematic exploration of subsecond and suprasecond timing within the same sessio...

Timing is ever-present in our daily lives — from the ringing of the alarm clock to our ability to walk, dance, remember, and communicate with others. This in- timate relationship has led scientists from different disciplines to investigate tim- ing mechanisms and to explore how individuals perceive, process, and effectively use timing in their dail...

Understanding how sensory and motor processes are temporally integrated for the control of behavior in the hundredths of milliseconds-to-minutes range is a fascinating problem given that the basic electrophysiological properties of neurons operate on a millisecond time scale. Single-unit recording studies in monkeys have identified localized timing...

Healthy volunteers were tested on 7-s and 17-s peak-interval timing procedures following d-amphetamine (20mg-oral), haloperidol (2mg-oral), and placebo treatments in order to assess the dopaminergic regulation of temporal processing. Individual differences were observed in the drug effects such that two different patterns of timing behavior emerged...

Our ability to measure time persists in the face of a wide variety of neural insults. In combination with the large array of neural structures that have been shown to activate during timing tasks, this resilience suggests that multiple brain networks are capable of measuring time. This article explores this apparent 'degeneracy' (a concept explaine...

Key points In the primary taste cortex, two populations of neurons have been identified whose activity either correlates or anticorrelates with tastant concentration. The relative contribution of each population to signalling the perceived intensity of taste is unknown. To resolve this issue, we recorded activity from neurons in primary taste corte...

http://www.frontiersin.org/Integrative_Neuroscience/researchtopics/Interval_Timing_and_Time_Based/169

Time-based decision-making in peak-interval timing procedures involves the setting of response thresholds for the initiation ("Start") and termination ("Stop") of a response sequence that is centered on a target duration. Using intracerebral infusions of the protein synthesis inhibitor anisomycin, we report that the acquisition of the "Start" respo...

The Psychologist special feature "About time" edited by Jon Sutton. Includes articles by Dan Zakay, John Wearden, Sylvie Droit-Volet, Ruth Ogden & Catharine Montgomery, and Penelope A. Lewis & Warren H. Meck.

The relation between the contingent negative variation (CNV) and time estimation is evaluated in terms of temporal accumulation and preparation processes. The conclusion is that the CNV as measured from the electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded at fronto-central and parietal-central areas is not a direct reflection of the underlying interval timing m...

Neural timing mechanisms range from the millisecond to diurnal, and possibly annual, frequencies. Two of the main processes under study are the interval timer (seconds-to-minute range) and the circadian clock. The molecular basis of these two mechanisms is the subject of intense research, as well as their possible relationship. This article summari...

Sex differences in the rapid and acute effects of estradiol on time perception were investigated in adult male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. Because estradiol has been shown to increase striatal dopamine release, it may be able to modify time perception and timed performance by increasing the speed of an internal clock in a manner similar to indi...

Estimations of time and number share many similarities in both non-humans and man. The primary focus of this review is on the development of time and number sense across infancy and childhood, and neuropsychological findings as they relate to time and number discrimination in infants and adults. Discussion of these findings is couched within a mode...

Distortions in time perception and timed performance are presented by a number of different neurological and psychiatric conditions (e.g. Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism). As a consequence, the primary focus of this review is on factors that define or produce systematic changes in the attentio...

The perception of time is heavily influenced by attention and memory, both of which change over the lifespan. In the current study, children (8 yrs), young adults (18-25 yrs), and older adults (60-75 yrs) were tested on a duration bisection procedure using 3 and 6-s auditory and visual signals as anchor durations. During test, participants were exp...

Aged male rats at 10, 20, and 30 mo of age were trained on a 2.0 vs. 8.0-s duration bisection procedure using both auditory and visual signals and were then tested with visual signal durations in which the spacing of the intermediate signal durations was held constant as the short (S) and long (L) anchor durations were moved progressively closer to...

Quinpirole-sensitized rats were tested on a discrete-trials 40-s peak-interval procedure using lever pressing as the instrumental response. Although there was no evidence of rhythmical activity in lever pressing, periodic output was observed in a secondary response (food-cup entries) during the inter-trial interval following the delivery of reinfor...

The relation between the contingent negative variation (CNV) and time estimation is evaluated in terms of temporal accumulation and preparation processes. The conclusion is that the CNV as measured from the electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded at fronto-central and parietal-central areas is not a direct reflection of the underlying interval timing m...

Distortions in temporal memory can occur as a function of differences in signal modalities and/or by the encoding of multiple signal durations associated with different timing tasks into a single memory distribution – an effect referred to as “memory mixing”. Evidence for this type of memory distortion and/or categorization of signal durations as a...

We all have a sense of time. Yet, there are no sensory receptors specifically dedicated for perceiving time. It is an almost uniquely intangible sensation: we cannot see time in the way that we see color, shape, or even location. So how is time represented in the brain? We explore the neural substrates of metrical representations of time such as du...

Distortions in temporal memory can occur as a function of differences in signal modalities and/or by the encoding of multiple signal durations associated with different timing tasks into a single memory distribution – an effect referred to as “memory mixing”. Evidence for this type of memory distortion and/or categorization of signal durations as a...