Short communicationNovel behavioral tasks to explore cerebellar temporal processing in milliseconds in rats

- We devised two novel behavioral tasks for researching milliseconds timing.
- Rats needed only two training sessions to represent 500 ms interval in this task.
- Rats changed strategies to process discrete and continuous timings among two tasks.
- Rats can represent discrete and continuous timings with almost identical movements.

Temporal processing in milliseconds has been reported to rely on the cerebellum; however, no detailed neuronal mechanisms have been published yet. This is because there are too few studies on the relationship between temporal processing in milliseconds and cerebellar neuronal spikes that organize behavioral timing. To demonstrate this relationship, it is necessary to record the spike activity while the animal is performing a behavioral task that requires specific temporal processing in milliseconds. In this study, we describe two novel timing tasks. These behavioral tasks comprise the following schedules: fixed ratio (FR) and differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL). This paper describes the behavioral differences between the absolute timing of individual intervals (duration based timing) and the relative timing of rhythmic sequences (beat-based timing) in these novel tasks.