Retrospective time estimation following damage to the prefrontal cortex

Abstract

Time estimation in patients with prefrontal cortex (PFC) damage is often inaccurate. The relationship between PFC and estimation of short time intervals has been examined. However, it remains unclear whether PFC damage affects estimation of longer time intervals. Here, we investigated the ability of patients and healthy subjects to verbally estimate a period of 30 min, using a method easily applied in clinical settings. In 99 patients with brain damage, we compared under and normal ranges of time in patients with PFC damage or damage to other brain areas with the chi-squared test. Subsequently, we conducted a discriminant analysis and a multiple linear regression analysis to identify specific brain areas affecting time estimation. We observed a significantly larger number of patients who overestimated 30 min in the group with bilateral PFC damage compared to patients with damage to other regions. Discriminant analysis revealed that damage of right lateral PFC and left medial PFC contributed to discrimination between the normal range and overestimation groups. Multiple linear regression analysis indicated that right lateral PFC damage strongly affected overestimation of a 30-min interval. Neuropsychological test results revealed lower general cognitive function scores and orientation scores in overestimation group. The length of estimated time and the score of delayed word recall were negatively correlated. We propose that these may require encoding, maintenance, and updating of memory and are indirectly related to contextual memory. We discuss hypotheses on contextual memory segmentation and reconstruction to clarify the mechanism of impaired time overestimation in PFC-damaged patients.

The Role of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex for Speech and Language Processing

“…These effects can be interpreted in terms of cognitive timing strategies, bound to the excitability of right DLPFC (Lewis and Miall, 2006;de Oliveira et al, 2016;Yin et al, 2019). This is also in line with clinical studies reporting time estimation deficits in cases of prefrontal lesions (Kurosaki et al, 2020) as well as with the time-processing effects of drugs that influence the function of prefrontal cortex (Farais et al, 2019). Further evidence of the timing function of the DLPFC is its connectivity to a corticosubcortical integration network including SMA, insula, and basal ganglia, that is involved in the timing of the voluntary movements (Sarubbo et al, 2015).…”

A neural code for spatiotemporal context

“…Our task additionally enabled direct comparison between human and animal neuronal responses to time, revealing broadly conserved qualities across species. Specifically, we find that human time cells: (1) span entire event durations; (2) accumulate error in the absence of external cues; (3) remap between events for which context discrimination (here gold searching versus digging) is behaviorally adaptive; and (4) reside in the MTL and mPFC (7-9, 18, 19, 23, 24, 28-31).…”

“…Time and space are central organizers of human experience, allowing us to reconstruct the past and envision the future. Lesions to the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) disrupt associations between events and their temporal ( 1, 2 ) and spatial ( 3–5 ) contexts. Parallel lines of research have uncovered neurons in these regions that fire at specific locations within a given environment (‘place cells’ ( 6 )) or specific moments within a stable interval (‘time cells’ ( 7–9 )), providing a candidate biological basis for the cognitive map of time and space that frames human experience.…”

Temporal judgments of actions following unilateral brain damage

“…Underestimation of time intervals has been found in right hemisphere damaged patients, with worse performance in the presence of spatial disorders such as spatial neglect [48][49][50][51] (but see 9 who do not find any differences in right brain damaged-RBD-with and without neglect). Only a few studies compare patients suffering from left and right hemisphere lesions, with inconsistent results 9,47,[52][53][54] . Indeed, while some studies show the right but not left hemisphere damaged patients underestimating time intervals 52,53 , a more recent study 47 reveals that symptoms may vary based on the time from the lesion onset.…”