TOWARD A NEUROBIOLOGY OF TEMPORAL COGNITION - ADVANCES AND CHALLENGES

A rich tradition of normative psychophysics has identified two ubiquit ous properties of interval timing: the scalar property, a strong form of Weber's law, and ratio comparison mechanisms. Finding the neural su bstrate of these properties is a major challenge for neurobiology. Rec ently, advances have been made in our understanding of the brain struc tures important for timing, especially the basal ganglia and the cereb ellum. Surgical intervention or diseases of the cerebellum generally r esult in increased variability in temporal processing, whereas both cl ock and memory effects are seen for neurotransmitter interventions, le sions and diseases of the basal ganglia. We propose that cerebellar dy sfunction may induce deregulation of tonic thalamic tuning, which disr upts gating of the mnemonic temporal information generated in the basa l ganglia through striato-thalamo-cortical loops.