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Trial-by-trial predictions of subjective time from human brain activity

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posted on 2023-06-10, 03:36 authored by Maxine ShermanMaxine Sherman, Zafeirios Fountas, Anil SethAnil Seth, Warrick RoseboomWarrick Roseboom
Human experience of time exhibits systematic, context-dependent deviations from 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 24 seconds 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 duration, purely from salient events in their visual cortex BOLD activity. By contrast, salient events in neither of two control regions – auditory and somatosensory cortex – were predictive of duration biases. These results held despite being able to (trivially) predict clock time from all three brain areas. Our results reveal that the information arising during perceptual processing of a dynamic environment provides a sufficient basis for reconstructing human subjective time duration.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

PLoS Computational Biology

ISSN

1553-734X

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Issue

7

Volume

18

Article number

e1010223

Department affiliated with

  • Informatics Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2022-05-20

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2022-07-13

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2022-05-19

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