FUNCTION AND NEURONAL MECHANISMS OF INTERVAL TIMING

在过去的几年里，许多经验和理论的努力， 一直致力于了解间隔时间感，处理 在动物中，持续时间为秒级。一个连贯的理论 时间处理的中心组成部分的描述已经 详细阐述，包括各种各样的动物学习和 心理物理学范式最近，这些范例中的许多已经被 与人类一起研究，证实了我们描述的中心特征。这个和 Meck的同伴建议，扩展了这种对人类和 动物计时本提案专门讨论这些范例， 正常人群和患有以下疾病的患者人群 基底神经节显示出异常的时间处理。疾病 基底神经节会干扰时间处理的某些成分 系统，并提出了不同类型的功能障碍的概况 与不同结构的神经损伤有关。这项建议 将这些患者人群与实验中的标准数据进行对比 旨在揭示认知障碍的不同组成部分， 与纹状体-皮层中的不同神经损伤相关的处理 网络.研究了两大类认知功能障碍： 涉及记忆存储和/或时间信息检索中的失真 信息，另一个具体的同时处理的时间 信息.前者对多巴胺能调节敏感， 后者与纹状体结构的损伤有关。

Over the past several years, much empirical and theoretical effort has been devoted to understanding the interval time sense, processing of durations of the order of seconds, in animals. A coherent theoretical description of the central components of temporal processing has been elaborated, encompassing a wide variety of animal learning and psychophysics paradigms. More recently many of these paradigms have been studied with humans, confirming central features of our account. This and the companion proposal from Meck, extends this parallel study of human and animal timing. The present proposal is devoted to these paradigms in normative human populations and in patient populations with disorders of the basal ganglia showing aberrant temporal processing. Disorders of the basal ganglia interfere with certain components of temporal processing systems and present a profile of different kinds of dysfunctions associated with neural damage to different structures. This proposal contrasts these patient populations with normative data in experiments designed to reveal distinct components of cognitive impairment in temporal processing associated with distinct neural damage in striato-cortical networks. Two major classes of cognitive dysfunction are studied: one involving distortions in memory storage and/or retrieval of temporal information, and another specific to simultaneous processing of temporal information. The former is sensitive to dopaminergic regulation and the latter is associated with damage to structures in the striatum.