For many animal species, knowing when to look for food may be as important as knowing where to look. Rats and other species use a feeding-responsive circadian timing mechanism to anticipate, behaviorally and physiologically, a predictable daily feeding opportunity. How this mechanism for anticipating a daily meal accommodates more than one predictable mealtime is unclear. Rats were trained to press a lever for food, and then limited to one or more daily meals at fixed or systematically varying times of day. The rats were able to anticipate up to 4 of 4 daily meals at fixed times of day and two ‘daily’ meals recurring at 24 h and 26 h intervals. When deprived of food, in constant dark, lever pressing recurred for multiple cycles at expected mealtimes, consistent with the periodicity of the prior feeding schedule. Anticipation did not require the suprachiasmatic nucleus circadian pacemaker. The anticipation rhythms could be simulated using a Kuramoto model in which clusters of coupled oscillators entrain to specific mealtimes based on initial phase and intrinsic circadian periodicity. A flexibly coupled system of food-entrainable circadian oscillators endows rats with adaptive plasticity in daily programming of foraging activity.

Rats can anticipate a daily feeding time. This has been interpreted as a rhythm controlled by food-entrainable circadian oscillators, because the rhythm persists during several cycles of total food deprivation and fails to track mealtimes if the feeding schedule deviates substantially from 24. These and other properties distinguish anticipation of daily meals from anticipation of food rewards provided at intervals in the seconds-to-minutes range, suggesting distinct mechanisms. It has been reported that rats can anticipate meals at long, but noncircadian, intervals if they are required to work for food, and that anticipation of daily meals, expressed in operant behavior, shows the scalar property, a hallmark of timing intervals in the seconds-to-minutes range. These observations raise the possibility of a universal timing system, rather than unique mechanisms for circadian and noncircadian intervals. To test whether circadian constraints on daily meal timing depend on the measure of behavior, we re-examined formal properties of food anticipation using lever pressing and motion sensors. We observed robust anticipation in both measures to meals at 24-hr intervals but no anticipation of meals at 18-hr intervals in light-dark or constant light and no evidence that the duration of anticipation scales with the interval between lighting transitions and mealtime. We are therefore unable to confirm reports that operant measures can reveal timing at long, but noncircadian, intervals. If timing processes exist that do permit anticipation of events at long, but noncircadian, intervals, the conditions under which these can be revealed are evidently highly constrained.

The mechanisms that enable mammals to time events that recur at 24-h intervals (circadian timing) and at arbitrary intervals in the seconds-to-minutes range (interval timing) are thought to be distinct at the computational and neurobiological levels. Recent evidence that disruption of circadian rhythmicity by constant light (LL) abolishes interval timing in mice challenges this assumption and suggests a critical role for circadian clocks in short interval timing. We sought to confirm and extend this finding by examining interval timing in rats in which circadian rhythmicity was disrupted by long-term exposure to LL or by chronic intake of 25% DO. Adult, male Sprague-Dawley rats were housed in a light-dark (LD) cycle or in LL until free-running circadian rhythmicity was markedly disrupted or abolished. The rats were then trained and tested on 15- and 30-sec peak-interval procedures, with water restriction used to motivate task performance. Interval timing was found to be unimpaired in LL rats, but a weak circadian activity rhythm was apparently rescued by the training procedure, possibly due to binge feeding that occurred during the 15-min water access period that followed training each day. A second group of rats in LL were therefore restricted to 6 daily meals scheduled at 4-h intervals. Despite a complete absence of circadian rhythmicity in this group, interval timing was again unaffected. To eliminate all possible temporal cues, we tested a third group of rats in LL by using a pseudo-randomized schedule. Again, interval timing remained accurate. Finally, rats tested in LD received 25% DO in place of drinking water. This markedly lengthened the circadian period and caused a failure of LD entrainment but did not disrupt interval timing. These results indicate that interval timing in rats is resistant to disruption by manipulations of circadian timekeeping previously shown to impair interval timing in mice.

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