RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Trial-by-trial predictions of subjective time from human brain activity
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.01.09.900423
DO 10.1101/2020.01.09.900423
A1 Sherman, Maxine T.
A1 Fountas, Zafeirios
A1 Seth, Anil K.
A1 Roseboom, Warrick
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/29/2020.01.09.900423.abstract
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.