Male practitioners of physical activity present lower absolute power of beta band in time perception test.

Cortical changes resulting from physical activity and differences in the estimation of the time of practitioners and non-practitioners of physical activity have already been documented. However, there aren't studies that compare the cortical responses of the time estimate between these groups. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the influence of the level of physical activity in time estimation and beta band activity in frontal regions, specifically in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and parietal cortex during the task of estimating time in practitioners and non-practitioners of physical activity. After characterizing the sample, the signal was captured using an electroencephalogram during a task to estimate the time of four intervals of supraseconds. The results indicated that the practitioners of physical activity had lower errors in the evaluation of time for the intervals of 1 s, 7 s, and 9 s. The beta band showed less activity among practitioners of physical activity. The correlation between task performance and the absolute power of the beta band proved to be positive in the task of estimating time in the 7 s, and 9 s intervals. It was concluded that participants involved in the regular practice of physical activity showed underestimation in the temporal judgment and lower absolute power of the beta band during the time estimate.

Anatomy of human sensory cortices reflects inter-individual variability in time estimation.

The ability to estimate duration is essential to human behavior, yet people vary greatly in their ability to estimate time and the brain structures mediating this inter-individual variability remain poorly understood. Here, we showed that inter-individual variability in duration estimation was highly correlated across visual and auditory modalities but depended on the scale of temporal duration. We further examined whether this inter-individual variability in estimating durations of different supra-second time scales (2 or 12 s) was reflected in variability in human brain anatomy. We found that the gray matter volume in both the right posterior lateral sulcus encompassing primary auditory and secondary somatosensory cortex, plus parahippocampal gyrus strongly predicted an individual's ability to discriminate longer durations of 12 s (but not shorter ones of 2 s) regardless of whether they were presented in auditory or visual modalities. Our findings suggest that these brain areas may play a common role in modality-independent time discrimination. We propose that an individual's ability to discriminate longer durations is linked to self-initiated rhythm maintenance mechanisms relying on the neural structure of these modality-specific sensory and parahippocampal cortices.