Modeling circadian and sleep-homeostatic effects on short-term interval timing

Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience

Jakub eSpäti¹  Kazuo eMishima¹  Akiko eHida¹  Sayaka eAritake¹  Yoshiya eMoriguchi¹  Shigekazu eHiguchi¹  Shingo eKitamura¹  Andrea Hans Meyer² 

[1] National Institute of Mental Health,National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry;University of Basel;

关键词: Circadian Rhythm;    Sleep;    Time Perception;    interval timing;    mixed models;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnint.2015.00015

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Short-term interval timing i.e., perception and action relating to durations in the seconds range, has been suggested to display time-of-day as well as wake dependent fluctuations due to circadian and sleep-homeostatic changes to the rate at which an underlying pacemaker emits pulses; pertinent human data being relatively sparse and lacking in consistency however, the phenomenon remains elusive and its mechanism poorly understood.To better characterize the putative circadian and sleep-homeostatic effects on interval timing and to assess the ability of a pacemaker-based mechanism to account for the data, we measured timing performance in eighteen young healthy male subjects across two epochs of sustained wakefulness of 38.67 h each, conducted prior to (under entrained conditions) and following (under free-running conditions) a 28 h sleep-wake schedule, using the methods of duration estimation and duration production on target intervals of 10 and 40 s.Our findings of opposing oscillatory time courses across both epochs of sustained wakefulness that combine with increasing and, respectively, decreasing, saturating exponential change for the tasks of estimation and production are consistent with the hypothesis that a pacemaker emitting pulses at a rate controlled by circadian oscillator and increasing with time awake determines human short-term interval timing; the duration-specificity of this pattern is interpreted as reflecting challenges to maintaining stable attention to the task that progressively increase with stimulus magnitude and thereby moderate the effects of pacemaker-rate changes on overt behavior.

【 授权许可】

Unknown