Memory for time

Marc Howard

Abstract:

The brain maintains a record of recent events including information about
the time at which events were experienced. We review behavioral and neurophysiological evidence as well as computational models to better understand
memory for time. Neurophysiologically, populations of neurons that record
the time of recent events have been observed in many brain regions. Time
cells fire in long sequences after a triggering event demonstrating memory for
the past. Populations of exponentially-decaying neurons record past events
at many delays by decaying at different rates. Both kinds of representations record distant times with less temporal resolution. The work reviewed
here converges on the idea that the brain maintains a representation of past
events along a scale-invariant compressed timeline.