Study reveals that pets can tell time

Yes, your cat knows his feeding schedule and your dog knows when he is usually out walking – or at least our animals have an idea of ​​how time works, according to a new study from Northwestern University.

According to a statement from the school, a recent study has uncovered a set of neurons in the internal entorhinal cortex of a mouse's brain that "lights up like a clock when an animal waits".

"Does your dog know that it took you twice as long to get your food as before? There was no good answer to that before, "said Daniel Dombeck, associate professor of neurobiology at Northwestern College of Arts and Sciences Weinberg, who led the study. "This is one of the most compelling experiments to show that animals actually have an explicit representation of time in their brains when challenged to measure a time interval."

In this groundbreaking study – recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience – Dombeck and his team studied the internal entorhinal cortex of mice. The team chose this part of the brain, located in the temporal lobe, because it is the area related to memory and navigation. Dombeck hypothesized that this could also be the area responsible for the "coding of time" of an animal.

To test this theory, the researchers created a virtual test for their mouse subjects, called "door stop task". For this experiment, a mouse was running on a physical treadmill in a virtual environment consisting of a hallway leading to a door. While running the environment, the mouse learned that if he followed the hallway to a door, the door would open after six seconds and he would receive a reward.

Once the mouse learned where the door was, it was replaced by an invisible door. Even when the study mice could not see the door, they could still stop at the invisible door and wait six seconds before continuing through the invisible door to get their reward.

"The important point here is that the mouse does not know when the door is open or closed because it's invisible," said in a statement James Heys, one of the authors of the study . "The only way for him to effectively solve this task is to use the sense of internal time in his brain."

Previously unknown neurons responsible for this understanding of time were discovered by brain imaging of participating mice while they were performing the task of stopping the door.

"As the animals run along the track and make their way to the invisible gate, we see the cells going off to control spatial coding," Dombeck said. "Then, when the animal stops at the door, we see these cells go out and a new set of cells light up. It was a big surprise and a new discovery. "

This discovery of "timing cells" means that your cat is probably aware that his breakfast is 10 minutes late, but it could also be a step forward for the man. As the cortex is often one of the first parts of the brain affected by the onset of Alzheimer's disease, this same "door-stop operation" could be replicated for humans to facilitate early detection of the disease. Alzheimer.