PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Sherman, Maxine T.
AU  - Fountas, Zafeirios
AU  - Seth, Anil K.
AU  - Roseboom, Warrick
TI  - Trial-by-trial predictions of subjective time from human brain activity
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.09.900423
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.09.900423
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/29/2020.01.09.900423.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/29/2020.01.09.900423.full
AB  - Human experience of time exhibits systematic, context-dependent deviations from veridical clock time; for example, time is experienced differently at work than on holiday. Here we test the proposal that differences from clock time in subjective experience of time arise because time estimates are constructed by accumulating the same quantity that guides perception: salient events. Healthy human participants watched naturalistic, silent videos of up to ∼1 minute in duration and estimated their duration while fMRI was acquired. We were able to reconstruct trial-by-trial biases in participants’ duration reports, which reflect subjective experience of time (rather than veridical clock time), purely from salient events in their visual cortex BOLD activity. This was not the case for control regions in auditory and somatosensory cortex, despite being able to predict clock time from all three brain areas. Our results reveal that the information arising during sensory processing of our dynamic environment provides a sufficient basis for reconstructing human subjective time estimates.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.