Time coding in rat dorsolateral striatum

To assess the role of dorsolateral striatum (DLS) in time coding, we recorded neuronal activity in rats tasked with comparing the durations of two sequential vibrations. Bayesian decoding of population activity revealed a representation of the unfolding of the trial across time. However, further analyses demonstrated a distinction between the encoding of trial time and perceived time. First, DLS did not show a privileged representation of the stimulus durations compared with other time spans. Second, higher intensity vibrations were perceived as longer; however, time decoded from DLS was unaffected by vibration intensity. Third, DLS did not encode stimulus duration differently on correct versus incorrect trials. Finally, in rats trained to compare the intensities of two sequential vibrations, stimulus duration was encoded even though it was a perceptually irrelevant feature. These findings lead us to posit that temporal information is inherent to DLS activity irrespective of the rat's ongoing percept.