Deane Ashley R, Millar Jessica, Bilkey David K, Ward Ryan D
Department of Psychology, University of Otago. Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand.
PLoS One. 2017 Nov 6;12(11):e0187719. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187719. eCollection 2017.
The neurophysiology underlying temporal perception significantly overlaps with areas of dysfunction identified in schizophrenia. Patients commonly exhibit distorted temporal perception, which likely contributes to functional impairments. Thus, study of temporal perception in animal models of the disease may help to understand both cognitive and neurobiological factors involved in functional impairments in patients. As maternal immune activation (MIA) has been shown to be a significant etiological risk factor in development of schizophrenia and other developmental psychiatric diseases, we tested interval timing in a rat model of MIA that has previously been shown to recapitulate several behavioural and neurophysiological impairments observed in the disease. Rats were tested on a temporal-bisection task, in which temporal duration stimuli were categorized as either "short" or "long" by responding to a corresponding lever. Data from this task were modeled to provide estimates of accuracy and sensitivity of temporal perception. Parameter estimates derived from the model fitting showed that MIA rats significantly overestimated the passage of time compared to controls. These results indicate that the MIA rat paradigm recapitulates timing distortions that are phenotypical of schizophrenia. These findings lend further support to the epidemiological validity of this MIA rat model, supporting its relevance for future research into the role of maternal immune activation in producing neurobiological and behavioural impairments in schizophrenia.
时间感知背后的神经生理学与精神分裂症中确定的功能障碍区域有显著重叠。患者通常表现出时间感知扭曲，这可能导致功能受损。因此，在该疾病的动物模型中研究时间感知可能有助于理解患者功能受损所涉及的认知和神经生物学因素。由于母体免疫激活（MIA）已被证明是精神分裂症和其他发育性精神疾病发展中的一个重要病因风险因素，我们在一个MIA大鼠模型中测试了间隔计时，该模型先前已被证明能重现该疾病中观察到的几种行为和神经生理学损伤。对大鼠进行了时间二等分任务测试，在该任务中，通过对相应杠杆的反应将时间持续刺激分类为“短”或“长”。对该任务的数据进行建模以提供时间感知准确性和敏感性的估计。模型拟合得出的参数估计表明，与对照组相比，MIA大鼠显著高估了时间的流逝。这些结果表明，MIA大鼠模型重现了精神分裂症典型的计时扭曲。这些发现进一步支持了这个MIA大鼠模型的流行病学有效性，支持其在未来研究母体免疫激活在精神分裂症中产生神经生物学和行为损伤作用方面的相关性。
