1 Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
2 Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research-BRAMS, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
3 Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Rhythm and time in the premotor cortex.

PLoS Biol. 2019 Jun 03;17(6):e3000293

Authors: Penhune VB, Zatorre RJ

Abstract

Many animals can encode temporal intervals and use them to plan their actions, but only humans can flexibly extract a regular beat from complex patterns, such as musical rhythms. Beat-based timing is hypothesized to rely on the integration of sensory information with temporal information encoded in motor regions such as the medial premotor cortex (MPC), but how beat-based timing might be encoded in neuronal populations is mostly unknown. Gámez and colleagues show that the MPC encodes temporal information via a population code visible as circular trajectories in state space; these patterns may represent precursors to more-complex skills such as beat-based timing.

PMID: 31158227 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]