A neurobiological model for timing and time perception

Frontal-striatal circuits provide an important neurobiological substrate for timing and time perception as well as for working memory. In this review, we outline recent theoretical and empirical work to suggest that interval timing and working memory rely not only on the same anatomic structures, but also on the same neural representations of stimuli, and striatal medium spiny neurons detect those patterns of cortical firing that occur co-incident to important temporal events. Information about stimulus identity can be extracted from the specific cortical networks that are involved in the representation, and information about duration can be extracted from the relative phasee of neural firing. The properties derived from these neurobiological models fit well with the psychophysics of timing and time perception as well with information-processing models that emphasize the importance of temporal coding in a variety of workin-memory phenomena. © 2004 Publié par Elsevier SAS pour Société française de psychologie.