Common and distinct roles of frontal midline theta and occipital alpha oscillations in coding temporal intervals and spatial distances

Abstract

Judging how far something is and how long it takes to get there are critical to memory and navigation. Yet, the neural codes for spatial and temporal information remain unclear, particularly how and whether neural oscillations might be important for such codes. To address these issues, participants traveled through teleporters in a virtual town while we simultaneously recorded scalp EEG. Participants judged the distance and time spent inside the teleporter. Our findings suggest that alpha power relates to distance judgments while frontal theta power relates to temporal judgments. In contrast, changes in alpha frequency and beta power indexed both spatial and temporal judgments. We also found evidence for fine-grained temporal coding and an effect of past trials on temporal but not spatial judgments. Together, these findings support partially independent coding schemes for spatial and temporal information, and suggest that low-frequency oscillations play important roles in coding both space and time.

Partially Separable Aspects of Spatial and Temporal Estimations in Virtual Navigation as Revealed by Adaptation

“…However, while similar characteristics are known for distance and time estimation, whether they are processed by shared or separate systems is still under debate. Accumulating evidence has shown that there is an asymmetric or independent relationship between the estimation of travel time and travel distance ( Brunec et al, 2017 ; Riemer et al, 2018 ; Robinson et al, 2019 ) and between their neural substrates ( Liang et al, 2020 ; Robinson & Wiener, 2021 ). At the lower levels, perception of travel time is influenced by distance, whereas perception of travel distance is not affected by time, which is consistent with the view that perception of temporal features is susceptible to spatial features, but not vice versa ( Riemer et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Furthermore, at higher levels of decision making, the distance and time to reach the reward are estimated independently in reward discounting ( Robinson et al, 2019 ). In addition, EEG studies have indicated that distance and time are processed by distinct coding schemes in terms of ERPs ( Robinson & Wiener, 2021 ) and oscillations ( Liang et al, 2020 ). These findings suggest that travel distance and travel time are closely related, but may be processed by partially separable systems.…”