Johnston Melissa, Kirschhock Maximilian E, Nieder Andreas
Animal Physiology Unit, Institute of Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2025 Sep 10;16(1):8256. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-63820-5.
Interval timing, the ability to perceive and estimate durations between events, is essential for many animal behaviors. In mammals, it is linked to specific cortical and sub-cortical brain regions, but its neural basis in birds remains unclear. We trained two male carrion crows on a time estimation task using visual stimuli, cueing them to wait for a minimum duration of 1500 ms, 3000 ms, or 6000 ms before responding to receive a reward. During the task, we recorded activity from single neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), the avian executive telencephalon. Many neurons showed tuning to specific durations, suggesting that time intervals are encoded as abstract magnitudes along an ordered scale. Population-level decoding revealed that NCL activity predicted the crows' intended wait time, independent of the sensory properties of the cues. These findings show that abstract time estimation can emerge from neural architectures different from the mammalian neocortex.
间隔计时，即感知和估计事件之间持续时间的能力，对许多动物行为至关重要。在哺乳动物中，它与特定的皮层和皮层下脑区有关，但在鸟类中其神经基础仍不清楚。我们使用视觉刺激对两只雄性食腐鸦进行了时间估计任务训练，提示它们在做出反应以获得奖励之前等待至少1500毫秒、3000毫秒或6000毫秒的持续时间。在任务过程中，我们记录了尾外侧巢皮质（NCL）中单个神经元的活动，NCL是鸟类的执行端脑。许多神经元表现出对特定持续时间的调谐，这表明时间间隔是沿着有序尺度编码为抽象量值的。群体水平解码显示，NCL活动预测了乌鸦的预期等待时间，与线索的感觉属性无关。这些发现表明，抽象时间估计可以从不同于哺乳动物新皮层的神经结构中产生。
