The brain and the subjective experience of time. A voxel based symptom-lesion mapping study

Uncoupling Sensation and Perception in Human Time Processing

“…At more lenient thresholds ( p < .001, uncorrected), we observed activations in the parietal cortex, a hub for abstract representations of quantities (Bueti & Walsh, 2009 ), posterior cingulate cortex, the angular gyrus, and the BG (right putamen and left caudate), all areas associated with perceptual timing tasks (Nenadic et al, 2003 ; Onoe et al, 2001 ; Rao et al, 2001 ; Ivry & Keele, 1989 ). Notably, we also observed activations in the anterior insula, which has been previously observed in imaging (Bueti & Macaluso, 2011 ; Wittmann et al, 2010 ) and brain lesion (Trojano et al, 2017 ) timing studies. The insula is believed to mediate the subjective awareness of duration through the integration of interoceptive signals (Wittmann & Meissner, 2018 ; Craig, 2009a , 2009b ).…”

“…Evaluating and comparing durations of sensory events is thought to require the interplay between parietal, premotor, cingulate, and prefrontal cortices and subcortical regions in the BG, cerebellum, and thalamus (Merchant & Yarrow, 2016;Coull, Nazarian, & Vidal, 2008). Although research has shed light on various processes that enable our sense of duration, such as the extraction and representation of duration information, or the mnemonic and decisional processes required for duration comparison and classification, the biological basis of the subjective experience of time remains scarcely understood (Wittmann & Meissner, 2018;Trojano, Caccavale, De Bellis, & Crisci, 2017;Bueti & Macaluso, 2011;Wittmann, 2009). Sensory input conveys durational information, with evidence from neural network modeling (Buonomano, Bramen, & Khodadadifar, 2009), brain stimulation (Salvioni, Murray, Kalmbach, & Bueti, 2013), and neuroimaging studies (Bueti, Bahrami, Walsh, & Rees, 2010;Bueti & Macaluso, 2010), suggesting that early striate and extrastriate ( V5/ MT) regions play a key role in temporal encoding and STM, independent of low-level visual feature processing.…”

“…Evaluating and comparing durations of sensory events is thought to require the interplay between parietal, premotor, cingulate, and prefrontal cortices and subcortical regions in the BG, cerebellum, and thalamus (Merchant & Yarrow, 2016 ; Coull, Nazarian, & Vidal, 2008 ). Although research has shed light on various processes that enable our sense of duration, such as the extraction and representation of duration information, or the mnemonic and decisional processes required for duration comparison and classification, the biological basis of the subjective experience of time remains scarcely understood (Wittmann & Meissner, 2018 ; Trojano, Caccavale, De Bellis, & Crisci, 2017 ; Bueti & Macaluso, 2011 ; Wittmann, 2009 ).…”

“…However, there is still a limited understanding of what subset of timing areas uniquely contribute to our subjective experience of time (Hayashi, van der Zwaag, Bueti, & Kanai, 2018 ; Trojano et al, 2017 ; Wittmann, Van Wassenhove, Craig, & Paulus, 2010 ; Wittmann & Paulus, 2008 ). Here, we address at which stage—within a timing hierarchy—our perceptual experience of duration (i.e., a duration “percept”) emerges.…”

Does the insula contribute to emotion‐related distortion of time? A neuropsychological approach

“…More recently, using a time reproduction task with negative and neutral pictures, Monfort et al () showed that a focal lesion of the right anterior insula was associated to aberrant reproduction times, suggesting that this structure would be involved in temporal precision independently of the nature of the stimulus. Lastly, a voxel based symptom‐lesion mapping study showed that lesions in the white matter posterior to the insula as well as in the insula were related to larger errors in time estimation (Trojano, Caccavale, De Bellis, & Crisci, ). However, this study did not address interval timing abilities, but the capacity to correctly recall the timing of self‐relevant events.…”