Time perception in patients with cerebellar lesion / 中华神经科杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To explore further the abilities of cerebellar lesions in skills of time estimation, and to test the hypothesis that cerebellum is involved in the special network of time perception. Methods Time reproduction was required for 3 time intervals of 600-milliseconds, 3 and 5 seconds with visual discrimination for control. Participants reproduce those time intervals after 1-second or 5-seconds of delay. Twenty-six patients with cerebellar lesions were compared to 26 healthy controls, matched for age, handedness, education. Results 600-milliseconds was overestimated by both cerebellar lesions and healthy controls, however, both 3-seconds and 5-seconds were underestimated. Patients with cerebellar lesions were significantly impaired on 600-milliseconds reproduction task ( delaying 1 s or 5 s, 1.37 ± 0.24, 1.26 ± 0.29 respectively, Z=-5.347, -4.230, both P<0.01). No group differences were found for the 3-seconds and 5-seconds time reproduction (delaying 1 s or 5 s, Z=-1.200,-0.092,-1.519, -0.723, all P>0.05). Conclusion The findings suggest that patients with cerebellar lesions perform poorly during measurement of the shorter interval, but show no impairment of longer intervals perception, supporting the hypotheses that cerebellum is specifically involved in the perception of sub-second intervals.