Neural substrates of Internally-Based and Externally-Cued Timing: an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of fMRI studies
Publication date: Available online 11 October 2018Source: Neuroscience & Biobehavioral ReviewsAuthor(s): Alice Teghil, Maddalena Boccia, Fabrizia D’Antonio, Antonella Di Vita, Carlo de Lena, Cecilia GuarigliaAbstractA dynamic interplay exists between Internally-Based (IBT) and Externally-Cued (ECT) time processing. While IBT processes support the self-generation of context-independent temporal representations, ECT mechanisms allow constructing temporal representations primarily derived from the structure of the sensory environment. We performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on 177 fMRI experiments, from 79 articles, to identify brain areas involved in timing; two individual ALEs tested the hypothesis of a neural segregation between IBT and ECT. The general ALE highlighted a network involving supplementary motor area (SMA), intraparietal sulcus, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), insula (INS) and basal ganglia. We found evidence of a partial dissociation between IBT and ECT. IBT relies on a subset of areas also involved in ECT, however ECT tasks activate SMA, right IFG, left precentral gyrus and INS in a significantly stronger way. Present results suggest that ECT involves the detection of environmental temporal regularities and their integration with the output of the IBT processing, to generate a representation of time which reflects the temporal metric of the environment.
Source: Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research