ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2016
Midbrain dopamine neurons control judgment of time.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 148 papers.
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Who cites it
148 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effects of microdose LSD on time perception: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.Psychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Dopamine modulation of motor and implicit learning contributions to auditory temporal attention.iScience · 2026Article
- Effort, timing and choice: a refined rodent effort choice task with excellent sensitivity to dopamine modulators.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Article
- Communication between the medial frontal cortex and mediodorsal thalamus is required for timing performance in rats.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2026Article
- Midbrain Dopamine Warps Subjective Time via Threshold Setting But Not Clock Speed.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- A behavioral integration mechanism underlies action timing.Science advances · 2026Article
- Time, space, memory and brain-body rhythms.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Effects of physical effort on temporal processing.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Article
- Reward-reset interval timing drives patch foraging decisions through neural state transitions in dorsomedial striatum.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Amphetamine increases timing variability by degrading prefrontal temporal encoding.Neuropharmacology · 2025Article
- Untangling the multifaceted VTA responses to stress.Trends in neurosciences · 2025Review
- Striatal dopamine signals errors in prediction across different informational domains.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain.Nature · 2025Article
- Article
- Nucleus Accumbens Dopamine Encodes the Trace Period during Appetitive Pavlovian Conditioning.eNeuro · 2025Article
- Medium Spiny Neurons Mediate Timing Perception in Coordination with Prefrontal Neurons in Primates.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Volitional Regulation and Transferable Patterns of Midbrain Oscillations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Rats and mice rapidly update timed behaviors.Animal cognition · 2025Article
88 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our sense of time is far from constant. For instance, time flies when we are having fun, and it slows to a trickle when we are bored. Midbrain dopamine neurons have been implicated in variable time estimation. However, a direct link between signals carried by dopamine neurons and temporal judgments is lacking. We measured and manipulated the activity of dopamine neurons as mice judged the duration of time intervals. We found that pharmacogenetic suppression of dopamine neurons decreased behavioral sensitivity to time and that dopamine neurons encoded information about trial-to-trial variability in time estimates. Last, we found that transient activation or inhibition of dopamine neurons was sufficient to slow down or speed up time estimation, respectively. Dopamine neuron activity thus reflects and can directly control the judgment of time.
Indexed as
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.