ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Turning the body into a clock: Accurate timing is facilitated by simple stereotyped interactions with the environment.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Differential cannabinergic effects on temporal perception and production.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- A behavioral integration mechanism underlies action timing.Science advances · 2026Article
- Brain-wide analysis reveals movement encoding structured across and within brain areas.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Time, space, memory and brain-body rhythms.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- The Role of Striatum in Controlling Waiting during Reactive and Self-Timed Behaviors.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Separating cognitive and motor processes in the behaving mouse.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Same principle, but different computations in representing time and space.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Active oscillations in microscale navigation.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Dissociating the contributions of sensorimotor striatum to automatic and visually guided motor sequences.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Using temperature to analyze the neural basis of a time-based decision.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Influence of Recent Trial History on Interval Timing.Neuroscience bulletin · 2023Article
- The role of consciously timed movements in shaping and improving auditory timing.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cerebellar contributions across behavioural timescales: a review from the perspective of cerebro-cerebellar interactions.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2023Review
- Precise Spiking Motifs in Neurobiological and Neuromorphic Data.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- Rodents monitor their error in self-generated duration on a single trial basis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- How movements shape the perception of time.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
- Low-dimensional dynamics for working memory and time encoding.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How animals adapt their behavior according to regular time intervals between events is not well understood, especially when intervals last several seconds. One possibility is that animals use disembodied internal neuronal representations of time to decide when to initiate a given action at the end of an interval. However, animals rarely remain immobile during time intervals but tend to perform stereotyped behaviors, raising the possibility that motor routines improve timing accuracy. To test this possibility, we used a task in which rats, freely moving on a motorized treadmill, could obtain a reward if they approached it after a fixed interval. Most animals took advantage of the treadmill length and its moving direction to develop, by trial-and-error, the same motor routine whose execution resulted in the precise timing of their reward approaches. Noticeably, when proficient animals did not follow this routine, their temporal accuracy decreased. Then, naïve animals were trained in modified versions of the task designed to prevent the development of this routine. Compared to rats trained in the first protocol, these animals didn't reach a comparable level of timing accuracy. Altogether, our results indicate that timing accuracy in rats is improved when the environment affords cues that animals can incorporate into motor routines.
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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.