Mice monitor their timing errors

Abstract

Animals often engage in representationally guided goal-directed behaviors. These behaviors are thus also subjected to representational uncertainty (e.g. timing uncertainty during waiting), which has been previously shown to adaptively guide behaviors normatively. These observations raise the question of whether non-human animals can track the direction and magnitude of their timing errors (i.e. temporal error monitoring). Only a few studies have investigated this question without addressing the key components of temporal error monitoring (e.g. due to differential reinforcement of metacognitive judgments and primary task representation). We conducted the critical test of temporal error monitoring in mice by developing a novel behavioral task that involved temporal production that exponentially favored temporal accuracy and minimized the contribution of sensorimotor noise. The response rate for an upcoming probabilistic reward following the timing performance was used as a proxy for confidence. We found that mice exhibited high reward expectancy after accurate and low reward expectancy after inaccurate timing performance. The reward expectancy decreased as a function of deviations from the target interval for the short and long reproductions; pointing to the symmetrical sensitivity of metacognition to shorter/longer than target responses. These findings suggest a complete temporal error monitoring ability for mice with human-like metacognitive features.