Relationship between choice of timing process and temporal information memory in rats

Abstract

The effect of the interruption of the timing stimulus (gap) in rats was examined by using the durationdiscrimination task. Rats trained to discriminate the duration of light stimulus (2 or 8s), then breaks of stimulus(0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8s) were inserted. They may restart the entire timing process called “reset" or they may “stop"timing for the duration of the gap. The reset had selected by the expansion of the gap duration. The selection rateof the stop increased in the processing at the gap after having trained the temporal information maintenancetask. These results suggested that the choice of timing processes, reset or stop, depend on the memory of thetemporal information