ArticleeLife2020
Neuronal timescales are functionally dynamic and shaped by cortical microarchitecture.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 188 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
188 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 328 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Systematic Review of Aperiodic Neural Activity in Clinical Investigations.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function?Neuron · 2025Pooled it
- Comprehensive profiling of brain dynamics during anesthesia across phylogeny.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Convergent multidimensional neural phenotypes in human patients and schizophrenia-relevant mouse models identify reduced recurrent excitation in cortical circuits.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Intrinsic timescale develops hierarchically from sensorimotor to association cortex in youth and stabilizes in adulthood.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Multimodal physiological correlates of surgeon stress in live robot-assisted surgery.Surgical endoscopy · 2026Observational
- Schizophrenia: temporal imprecision in phase, time, and frequency domains.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Potential mechanisms and functional significance of aperiodic neural activity.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Neural timescales from a computational perspective.Nature neuroscience · 2026Review
- The primate claustrum as a hub for precision weighting of prediction errors across the cortical hierarchy.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neuromorphic hierarchical modular reservoirs.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Aperiodic Dynamics of Cell Assemblies Recruited for L1 and L2 Processing of FrenchBrain sciences · 2026Article
- Sleep Deprivation in Mice: Looking Beyond the Slow Wave Rebound.Journal of sleep research · 2026Article
- Nonuniform spike count shared variability in the mouse early visual system.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Hierarchical Flows of Human Cortical Activity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Normative modeling of MEG brain oscillations across the human lifespan.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Selective control of prefrontal neural timescales by parietal cortex.Nature communications · 2026Article
- iSTTC: A robust method for accurate estimation of intrinsic neural timescales from single-unit recordings.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
128 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Complex cognitive functions such as working memory and decision-making require information maintenance over seconds to years, from transient sensory stimuli to long-term contextual cues. While theoretical accounts predict the emergence of a corresponding hierarchy of neuronal timescales, direct electrophysiological evidence across the human cortex is lacking. Here, we infer neuronal timescales from invasive intracranial recordings. Timescales increase along the principal sensorimotor-to-association axis across the entire human cortex, and scale with single-unit timescales within macaques. Cortex-wide transcriptomic analysis shows direct alignment between timescales and expression of excitation- and inhibition-related genes, as well as genes specific to voltage-gated transmembrane ion transporters. Finally, neuronal timescales are functionally dynamic: prefrontal cortex timescales expand during working memory maintenance and predict individual performance, while cortex-wide timescales compress with aging. Thus, neuronal timescales follow cytoarchitectonic gradients across the human cortex and are relevant for cognition in both short and long terms, bridging microcircuit physiology with macroscale dynamics and behavior.
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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.