Interval timing is undoubtedly crucial for action control and the survival and reproduction of organisms. Thus, how the brain tracks and records time is one of the essential problems in neuroscience. Institute faculty, Prof. Xin Jin, and his research team developed a new behavioral paradigm that requires the mice to track 30s interval by self-paced actions. They have found that the information the animal used for interval timing came from the auditory feedback generated by the animal’s own behavior during the waiting period. Notably, the higher-order auditory cortex is involved in processing the audiomotor feedback signals. They further identified a subpopulation of striatum-projecting neurons in the secondary auditory cortex that was involved in the process. Based on these results, Prof. Jin's team proposes a new neural model of interval timing, where the brain integrates the animal’s own actions and associated sensorimotor feedbacks to track time. This work was published in March 8 issue of Nature Neuroscience.
Journal Reference:
Cook, J.R., Li, H., Nguyen, B., Huang, H-H., Mahdavian, P., Kirchgessner, M.A., Strassmann, P., Engelhardt, M., Callaway, E.M., & Jin, X.* (2022). Secondary auditory cortex mediates a sensorimotor mechanism for action timing. Nat Neurosci, 25, 330–344.
>> To read the article in Chinese at the School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, click here.