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Chronotopic maps in human supplementary motor area.

  • Protopapa F International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
  • Hayashi MJ Global Center for Medical Engineering and Informatics, Osaka University, Suita, Japan.
  • Kulashekhar S International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
  • van der Zwaag W Animal Imaging and Technology, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM), Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Battistella G Department of Radiology, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Murray MM The Laboratory for Investigative Neurophysiology (The LINE), Department of Radiology and Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University Hospital Center and University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Kanai R Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom.
  • Bueti D International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
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  • 2019-03-22
Published in:
  • PLoS biology. - 2019
Adult
Brain
Brain Mapping
Female
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Motor Activity
Motor Cortex
Young Adult
English Time is a fundamental dimension of everyday experiences. We can unmistakably sense its passage and adjust our behavior accordingly. Despite its ubiquity, the neuronal mechanisms underlying the capacity to perceive time remains unclear. Here, in two experiments using ultrahigh-field 7-Tesla (7T) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show that in the medial premotor cortex (supplementary motor area [SMA]) of the human brain, neural units tuned to different durations are orderly mapped in contiguous portions of the cortical surface so as to form chronomaps. The response of each portion in a chronomap is enhanced by neighboring durations and suppressed by nonpreferred durations represented in distant portions of the map. These findings suggest duration-sensitive tuning as a possible neural mechanism underlying the recognition of time and demonstrate, for the first time, that the representation of an abstract feature such as time can be instantiated by a topographical arrangement of duration-sensitive neural populations.
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  • English
Open access status
gold
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https://sonar.ch/global/documents/126216
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