Many thanks again to my collaborators / supervisors @quiringehmacher.bsky.social, @peterkok.bsky.social, @drmattdavis.bsky.social, @clarepress.bsky.social for all their help with this project over the last two years. @uclpals.bsky.social, @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social, @mrccbu.bsky.social
… and when we explicitly judge time, the motor system reads out this temporally-precise content signal – calculating a change in sensory content as the basis for passing time, much like a tick of minute hand telling us that 60 seconds have passed.
Interestingly, these temporally-precise content predictions in visual areas appear regardless of task, unlike the motor signal. Given the two signatures’ alignment in time and strength, our predictions of time appear embedded in those concerning content …
Following the stimulus-empty window, participants saw a probe which, varying by block, they had to judge in terms of its orientation or timing. When judging time, but not orientation, motor oscillations phase-couple (or ‘entrain’) to the tracked – but absent – rhythm, predicting task performance.
We presented visual sequences predictable in both time and content leading up to a stimulus-empty window. There, we asked how the brain keeps track of the rhythmic temporal structure, both in overall neural activity and in activity tuned to the predicted content.
Content and time are inherently linked in our perceptual experience, so much so that we use changes in content – like hands on a clock – to tell time. Here, we ask how the brain conjointly keeps track of content and time.
Excited to share that our MEG project is now out in Current Biology! We show how visual content codes relate to motor oscillations in telling time.
Huge thanks to Quirin Gehmacher, Peter Kok, Matt Davis and Clare Press (bsky links below).🧵
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
At the same time, visual regions represent the predicted content – the orientation that would have appeared if the sequence had continued – in a temporally-precise way. Instead of overall visual activity entraining, specifically activity encoding predicted content rises and falls with the rhythm.
