Rodents monitor their error in self-generated duration on a single trial basis

Abstract

Significance Evaluating the richness of representations mapping animals’ experience of time and space is a profound problem in neuroscience. Animals could base their behavior only on recent rewards, but they also could rely on more complex representations of their own behavior. When faced with a deadline, individuals seem to adjust their decision based on the overall knowledge of their performance. We evaluated whether rats monitor the timing of their own actions or adapt only based on recent rewards. Rats accurately reported the magnitude of their timing error in self-generated time intervals. The results show that rats track their own timing errors, deepening our understanding of error-monitoring abilities in rodents and the richness of their representation of elapsed time.