An ERP study of the effect of time interval memory trace on temporal processing

The effect of time interval memory trace on temporal processing was investigated. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in a time reproduction task. Ten healthy participants were asked to memorize the encoding interval (3000 or 2700 ms), retain the interval during the retention period (3000 or 9000 ms) and reproduce the interval. The reproduction error of our study suggests that the reproduction of the interval was relatively difficult under encoding-2700 ms conditions. In the ERP activities at the 500-1000 ms period of the reproduction phase, the contingent negative variation (CNV) amplitude of retention-9000 ms conditions was significantly larger than that of retention-3000 ms conditions over Fpz. Our study suggests that the length of retention affects the time processing of the time reproduction, and the CNV over the frontal cortex seemed to change as a function of the remains of time interval memory trace being accompanied with attention resources allocation to efficiently execute the time reproduction task.