Neuropsychological mechanisms of interval timing behavior

Interval timing in the seconds-to-minutes range is believed to underlie a v ariety of complex behaviors in humans and other animals. One of the more in teresting problems in interval timing is trying to understand how the brain times events lasting for minutes with millisecond-based neural processes. Timing models proposing the use of coincidence-detection mechanisms (e.g., the detection of simultaneous activity across multiple neural inputs) appea r to be the most compatible with known neural mechanisms. From an evolution ary perspective, coincidence detection of neuronal activity may be a fundam ental mechanism of timing that is expressed across a wide variety of specie s. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.