Neurobiology of Interval Timing

The study of how the brain processes temporal information is becoming one of the most important topics in systems, cellular, computational, and cognitive neuroscience, as well as in the physiological bases of music and language. During the last and current decade, interval timing has been intensively studied in humans and animals using increasingly sophisticated methodological approaches. The present book will bring together the latest information gathered from this exciting area of research, putting special emphasis on the neural underpinnings of time processing in behaving human and non-human primates. Thus, Neurobiology of Interval Timing will integrate for the first time the current knowledge of both animal behavior and human cognition of the passage of time in different behavioral context, including the perception and production of time intervals, as well as rhythmic activities, using different experimental and theoretical frameworks. The book will the composed of chapters written by the leading experts in the fields of psychophysics, functional imaging, system neurophysiology, and musicology. This cutting-edge scientific work will integrate the current knowledge of the neurobiology of timing behavior putting in perspective the current hypothesis of how the brain quantifies the passage of time across a wide variety of critical behaviors.

Introduction to the Neurobiology of Interval Timing. - About the (non)scalar property for time perception
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Elucidating the internal structure of psychophysical timing performance in the sub-second and second range by utilizing confirmatory factor analysis. - Neurocomputational models

of time perception. - Dedicated Clock/Timing-Circuit Theories of Time Perception and Timed Performance. - Neural Dynamics Based Timing in the Subsecond to Seconds Range. - Signs of timing in motor cortex during movement preparation and cue anticipation. - Neurophysiology of timing in the hundreds of milliseconds: multiple layers of neuronal clocks in the medial premotor areas. - The Olivo-Cerebellar System as a Neural Clock. - From duration and distance comparisons to goal encoding in prefrontal cortex. - Probing Interval Timing with Scalp-recorded Electroencephalography (EEG). - Searching for the Holy Grail: Temporally Informative Firing Patterns in the Rat. - Getting the timing right: experimental protocols for investigating time with functional neuroimaging and psychopharmacology. - Motor and Perceptual timing in Parkinson s disease. - Music Perception: Information Flow within the Human Auditory Cortices. - Perceiving temporal regularity in music: The role of auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) in probing beat perception. - Neural Mechanisms of Rhythm Perception: Present Findings and Future Directions. - Neural underpinnings of music: The polyrhythmic brain.