NeuroSpin Saclay
WHEN? Representations and consequences of temporal predictions
Timing is a fundamental skill the brain uses to integrate information across senses and interact with dynamic environments. Despite its critical relevance, the cognitive and neural mechanisms that process time remain a significant puzzle in cognitive neuroscience. One aspect of this puzzle is implicit timing: the extraction of temporal regularities from sensory environments to form temporal predictions. Temporal predictions knowingly speed up motor and sensory responses, and enhance the sensitivity of the perceptual analysis in the auditory, visual, and tactile modality. My research focuses on the auditory domain, to which timing is of particular relevance, and has contributed to the demonstration that temporal predictions are formed automatically, even from subtle temporal regularities, and enhance pitch discrimination sensitivity. One putative neural implementation of temporal predictions is through neural oscillations in the delta band (0.5 – 3 Hz), which phase-reset with temporal cues in aperiodic and periodic environments. Throughout the talk I will focus on the question of how temporal predictions are formed from temporal statistics of sensory signals, and their representation at the cognitive and neural level.
References:
Gunasekaran, H., Azizi, L., van Wassenhove, V., & Herbst, S. K. (2023). Characterizing endogenous delta oscillations in human MEG. Scientific Reports, 13(1), Article 1.
Herbst, S. K., & Obleser, J. (2019). Implicit temporal predictability enhances pitch discrimination sensitivity and biases the phase of delta oscillations in auditory cortex. NeuroImage, 203, 116198.