Abstract
Temporal context is a crucial factor in timing. Previous studies have revealed that the timing of regular stimuli, such as isochronous beats or rhythmic sequences (termed beat-based timing), activated the basal ganglia, whereas the timing of single intervals or irregular stimuli (termed duration-based timing) activated the cerebellum. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to determine whether top-down processing of perceptual duration-based and beat-based timings affected brain activation patterns. Our participants listened to auditory sequences containing both single intervals and isochronous beats and judged either the duration of the intervals or the tempo of the beats. Whole-brain analysis revealed that both duration judgments and tempo judgments activated similar areas, including the basal ganglia and cerebellum, with no significant difference in the activated regions between the two conditions. In addition, an analysis of the regions of interest revealed no significant differences between the activation levels measured for the two tasks in the basal ganglia as well as the cerebellum. These results suggested that a set of common brain areas were involved in top-down processing of both duration judgments and tempo judgments. Our findings indicate that perceptual duration-based timing and beat-based timing are driven by stimulus regularity irrespective of top-down processing.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Enago (www.enago.jp) for the English language review.
Funding
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19H00634 to K.O. and Graduate Grant Program of Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences, Hokkaido University, awarded to M.N.
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MN: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing—Original Draft, Visualization. YH: Investigation, Data Curation, Writing—Review & Editing. FI: Investigation, Data Curation, Writing—Review & Editing. KO: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Resources, Writing—Review & Editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.
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The experimental protocol received approval from the local ethics committee, and the experiments were conducted in accordance with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from each participant.
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Communicated by Winston D Byblow.
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Niida, M., Haruki, Y., Imai, F. et al. Neural substrates of top-down processing during perceptual duration-based timing and beat-based timing. Exp Brain Res 241, 2133–2143 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-023-06665-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-023-06665-y