Processing of Different Temporal Scales in the Human Brain

Abstract

While recalling life events, we reexperience events of different durations, ranging across varying temporal scales, from several minutes to years. However, the brain mechanisms underlying temporal cognition are usually investigated only in small-scale periods—milliseconds to minutes. Are the same neurocognitive systems used to organize memory at different temporal scales? Here, we asked participants to compare temporal distances (time elapsed since event) to personal events at four different temporal scales (hour, day, week, and month) under fMRI. Cortical activity showed temporal scale sensitivity at the medial and lateral parts of the parietal lobe, bilaterally. Activity at the medial parietal cortex also showed a gradual progression from large- to small-scale processing, along a posterior–anterior axis. Interestingly, no sensitivity was found along the hippocampal long axis. In the medial scale-sensitive region, most of the voxels were preferentially active for the larger scale (month), and in the lateral region, scale selectivity was higher for the smallest scale (hour). These results demonstrate how scale-selective activity characterizes autobiographical memory processing and may provide a basis for understanding how the human brain processes and integrates experiences across timescales in a hierarchical manner.

A time-causal and time-recursive scale-covariant scale-space representation of temporal signals and past time

“…In an fMRI study of memory recall in human subjects over large variations in the time elapsed after the event, Monsa et al (2020) conclude that scale-selective activity characterizes autobiographical memory processing and may provide a basis for understanding how the human brain processes and integrates experiences across temporal scales in a hierarchical manner.…”

“…Specifically, in the areas of image processing, computer vision and machine hearing, this need is well understood, and has lead to multi-scale approaches for spatial, spatiotemporal and spectro-temporal receptive fields expressed in terms of multi-scale representations over the spatial, spectral and temporal domains, where specifically the theoretical framework known as scale-space theory is based upon solid theory in terms of axiomatic derivations concerning how the multi-scale processing operations should be performed (Iijima 1962;Witkin 1983;Koenderink 1984;van Doorn 1987, 1992;Lindeberg 1993bLindeberg , 1994Lindeberg , 2011Lindeberg , 2013bFlorack 1997;Sporring et al 1997;Weickert et al (1999);ter Haar Romeny 2003). It has also been found that biological perception, memory and cognition has developed biological processes at multiple temporal scales (DeAngelis et al 1995(DeAngelis et al , 2004Gütig and Sompolinsky 2006;Gentner 2008); Goldman (2009;Atencio and Schreiner 2012;Buzsáki and Llinás 2017;Tsao et al 2018;Osman et al 2018;Latimer et al 2019;Bright et al 2020;Cavanagh et al 2020;Monsa et al 2020;Spitmaan et al 2020;Howard and Hasselmo 2020;Howard 2021;Guo et al 2021;Miri et al 2021); see Section 6.3 for a more detailed retrospective review.…”

Processing of Different Social Scales in the Human Brain

“…Previous work showed that spatiotemporal and social functions rely on similar brain networks [18], [29]- [34] and that spatiotemporal processing is scale selective [24], [25]. To better understand the relations between the social and spatiotemporal functional networks and scales of proximity, we performed a voxel-wise comparison between brain representation of social scales as identified here and brain representation of spatial scales (room, building, neighborhood, city, country, continent), identified previously in a different cohort [24].…”

“…Two other studies [22], [23] investigated people's real world social networks (scales 1-5), and found that the temporoparietal junction, the posterior lateral temporal lobe and the retrosplenial cortex are involved in processing personal closeness. Yet, these studies did not systematically investigate reflections of the different social scales in brain activity, though such a reflection has been shown in between spatial and temporal scales [24], [25]. In an initial attempt to track the full sequence of social scales, Wlodarski & Dunbar [26] used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine social networks of participants.…”

“…As a result, this approach identified brain regions in which activity consistently increased (prefrontal, lingual and somatosensory cortices) or decreased (posterior cingulate and retrosplenial cortices) during the processing of more distant social scales. However, in other domains such as numerosity, space and time, neural activity exhibits a Gaussian-shaped rather than monotonic tuning curve [24], [25], [27], [28]. Furthermore, previous findings have implicated brain regions that displayed selectivity for one or more social scales, which do not follow this assumption of monotonicity [19].…”