Author
Sean Clarke
Bio: Sean Clarke is an academic researcher from University of California, Berkeley. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 47 citations.
Papers
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TL;DR: The hypothesis that the cerebellum can be conceptualized as a relatively task-independent timing mechanism that is capable of representing temporal information ranging from a few milliseconds to an upper bound of a few seconds is reviewed.
Abstract: The ability of an animal to process temporal information has adaptive significance across different temporal ranges. The ability to encode and utilize temporal information allows an animal to predict and anticipate events. However, the time scales vary widely. The predictable event might be based on information that changes over relatively long periods such as a year or a day, or over periods comprising much shorter durations, events that change within a few minutes or milliseconds. Are there a single set of neural mechanisms that are essential for representing temporal information over these different scales? Despite the fact that numerous neural structures have been linked to successful performance on a variety of timing tasks, this question has received relatively little attention. In this chapter, we will focus on the role of the cerebellum in a variety of timing tasks. We will review the hypothesis that the cerebellum can be conceptualized as a relatively task-independent timing mechanism. An important feature of this hypothesis is that the range of the cerebellar timing system is assumed to be relatively restricted. Specifically, we assume that the cerebellum is capable of representing temporal information ranging from a few milliseconds to an upper bound of a few seconds. What remains unclear is whether the cerebellum is involved on tasks spanning longer durations. Cognitive processes such as attention and memory become clearly important here, and indeed, may dominate performance for longer intervals. The animal literature points to non-cerebellar structures as playing a critical role in these tasks and we will provide a brief review of this work. Finally, we will present the preliminary results from two experiments designed to directly test the hypothesis that the cerebellum's temporal capabilities are limited to relatively short durations.
49 citations
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TL;DR: The neurobiological properties of the basal ganglia, an area known to be necessary for interval timing and motor control, suggests that this set of structures act as a coincidence detector of cortical and thalamic input.
791 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that careful analysis of this literature provides evidence for separate neural timing systems associated with opposing task characteristics, the 'automatic' system draws mainly upon motor circuits and the 'cognitively controlled' system depends upon prefrontal and parietal regions.
779 citations
TL;DR: It is proposed that cerebellar dysfunction may induce deregulation of tonic thalamic tuning, which disrupts gating of the mnemonic temporal information generated in the basal ganglia through striato-thalamo-cortical loops.
730 citations
TL;DR: Two subcortical structures, the cerebellum and basal ganglia, play a critical role in the timing of both movement and perception and are examined from both a neurological and a computational perspective.
645 citations
TL;DR: FMRI is used to isolate differences between the brain networks which measure 0.6 and 3s in a temporal discrimination task with visual discrimination for control, suggesting that distinct components are used for the two durations.
418 citations