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Time perception is an essential element of conscious and subconscious experience, coordinating our perception and interaction with the surrounding environment. In recent years, major technological advances in the field of neuroscience have helped foster new insights into the processing of temporal information, including extending our knowledge of the role of the cerebellum as one of the key nodes in the brain for this function. This consensus paper provides a state-of-the-art picture from the experts in the field of the cerebellar research on a variety of crucial issues related to temporal processing, drawing on recent anatomical, neurophysiological, behavioral, and clinical research.The cerebellar granular layer appears especially well-suited for timing operations required to confer millisecond precision for cerebellar computations. This may be most evident in the manner the cerebellum controls the duration of the timing of agonist-antagonist EMG bursts associated with fast goal-directed voluntary movements. In concert with adaptive processes, interactions within the cerebellar cortex are sufficient to support sub-second timing. However, supra-second timing seems to require cortical and basal ganglia networks, perhaps operating in concert with cerebellum. Additionally, sensory information such as an unexpected stimulus can be forwarded to the cerebellum via the climbing fiber system, providing a temporally constrained mechanism to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future processing. Patients with cerebellar disorders exhibit impairments on a range of tasks that require precise timing, and recent evidence suggest that timing problems observed in other neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, and dystonia may reflect disrupted interactions between the basal ganglia and cerebellum.The complex concepts emerging from this consensus paper should provide a foundation for further discussion, helping identify basic research questions required to understand how the brain represents and utilizes time, as well as delineating ways in which this knowledge can help improve the lives of those with neurological conditions that disrupt this most elemental sense. The panel of experts agrees that timing control in the brain is a complex concept in whom cerebellar circuitry is deeply involved. The concept of a timing machine has now expanded to clinical disorders.

Dyslexia is difficulty in acquiring reading skills despite adequate intelligence and sufficient reading opportunities. Its origin is still under debate. Studies usually focus on a singular cause for dyslexia; however, some researchers argue that dyslexia reflects multiple deficits. Two of the abilities under investigation in dyslexia are working memory (WM) and auditory temporal processing (ATP). In order to better evaluate the relative roles of WM and ATP in dyslexia, in the present study, we tested the contribution of WM and ATP to different types of reading performance and phonological awareness in dyslexia, using a multidimensional approach. Seventy-eight adults with dyslexia and 23 normal-reading adults performed WM and ATP tasks, as well as reading and phonological awareness tests. Readers with dyslexia showed poorer performance on all tests. Both WM and ATP were significant predictors of reading performance and phonological awareness among participants with dyslexia. Dividing participants with dyslexia according to their performance level on WM and ATP tasks revealed group differences in reading and phonological awareness tests. Both WM and ATP contribute to dyslexia, and varying levels of difficulties in both of these abilities are observed among this population. This is strong evidence in favor of the multi-deficit approach in dyslexia, and suggests that researchers should consider this approach in future studies of dyslexia.

This study aimed to examine the effects of temporal processing training on the reading abilities of Chinese children with dyslexia. In total, 69 Chinese children with dyslexia in grades three through six were recruited in Taiwan. The children were divided into the following three equal groups: (1) auditory temporal processing training group, (2) visual temporal processing training group, and (3) control group with no specific training. The participants in both training groups received instruction with identical durations (30–40 min), intensities (12 times in total), and frequencies (three to four times per week). The participants in the control group were asked to independently surf some specified websites using devices similar to those used by the two experimental groups for an identical duration, intensity, and frequency. Our results indicated that the two groups who received temporal processing training exhibited significant correlations among Chinese character reading, rapid naming, and corresponding readingrelated abilities, while visual temporal processing served as a significant predictor of Chinese character reading ability even if all background data, reading-related abilities, and auditory temporal processing were introduced first. Additionally, significant interactions were found between the Groups and Tested sessions in all the measures, except for phonological awareness, confirming the distinct effects of different temporal processing on most measures involved in this study. Further simple main effects revealed that only those who received the visual temporal processing training gained benefits in the corresponding reading-related ability (i.e., orthographic knowledge) and far-transfer to Chinese character reading.

Among the many questions regarding the ability to effortlessly name musical notes without a reference, also known as absolute pitch, the neural processes by which this phenomenon operates are still a matter of debate. Although a perceptual subprocess is currently accepted by the literature, the participation of some aspects of auditory processing still needs to be determined. We conducted two experiments to investigate the relationship between absolute pitch and two aspects of auditory temporal processing, namely temporal resolution and backward masking. In the first experiment, musicians were organized into two groups according to the presence of absolute pitch, as determined by a pitch identification test, and compared regarding their performance in the Gaps-in-Noise test, a gap detection task for assessing temporal resolution. Despite the lack of statistically significant difference between the groups, the Gaps-in-Noise test measures were significant predictors of the measures for pitch naming precision, even after controlling for possible confounding variables. In the second experiment, another two groups of musicians with and without absolute pitch were submitted to the backward masking test, with no difference between the groups and no correlation between backward masking and absolute pitch measures. The results from both experiments suggest that only part of temporal processing is involved in absolute pitch, indicating that not all aspects of auditory perception are related to the perceptual subprocess. Possible explanations for these findings include the notable overlap of brain areas involved in both temporal resolution and absolute pitch, which is not present in the case of backward masking, and the relevance of temporal resolution to analyze the temporal fine structure of sound in pitch perception.

Auditory temporal processing (ATP) has been related in the literature to both speech perception as well as reading and phonological awareness. In aging adults, it is known to be related to difficulties in speech perception. In the present study, we aimed to test whether an age-related deficit in ATP would also be accompanied by poor reading and phonological awareness. Thirty-eight aging adults were compared to 55 readers with dyslexia and 42 young normal readers on temporal order judgment (TOJ), speech perception, reading, and phonological awareness tests. Aging adults had longer TOJ thresholds than young normal readers, but shorter than readers with dyslexia; however, they had lower speech perception accuracy than both groups. Phonological awareness of the aging adults was better than readers with dyslexia, but poorer than young normal readers, although their reading accuracy was similar to that of the young controls. This is the first report on poor phonological awareness among aging adults. Surprisingly, it was not accompanied by difficulties in reading ability, and might instead be related to aging adults' difficulties in speech perception. This newly discovered relationship between ATP and phonological awareness among aging adults appears to extend the existing understanding of this relationship, and suggests it should be explored in other groups with ATP deficits.

During the last years, attention and controversy have been present for the first commercially available equipment being used in Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI), a new cardiac diagnostic tool which opens up a new field of diagnostic possibilities. Previous knowledge and criteria of cardiologists using intracardiac Electrograms (EGM) should be revisited from the newly available spatial–temporal potentials, and digital signal processing should be readapted to this new data structure. Aiming to contribute to the usefulness of ECGI recordings in the current knowledge and methods of cardiac electrophysiology, we previously presented two results: First, spatial consistency can be observed even for very basic cardiac signal processing stages (such as baseline wander and low-pass filtering); second, useful bipolar EGMs can be obtained by a digital processing operator searching for the maximum amplitude and including a time delay. In addition, this work aims to demonstrate the functionality of ECGI for cardiac electrophysiology from a twofold view, namely, through the analysis of the EGM waveforms, and by studying the ventricular repolarization properties. The former is scrutinized in terms of the clustering properties of the unipolar an bipolar EGM waveforms, in control and myocardial infarction subjects, and the latter is analyzed using the properties of T-wave alternans (TWA) in control and in Long-QT syndrome (LQTS) example subjects. Clustered regions of the EGMs were spatially consistent and congruent with the presence of infarcted tissue in unipolar EGMs, and bipolar EGMs with adequate signal processing operators hold this consistency and yielded a larger, yet moderate, number of spatial–temporal regions. TWA was not present in control compared with an LQTS subject in terms of the estimated alternans amplitude from the unipolar EGMs, however, higher spatial–temporal variation was present in LQTS torso and epicardium measurements, which was consistent through three different methods of alternans estimation. We conclude that spatial–temporal analysis of EGMs in ECGI will pave the way towards enhanced usefulness in the clinical practice, so that atomic signal processing approach should be conveniently revisited to be able to deal with the great amount of information that ECGI conveys for the clinician.

Current theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suggest atypical use of context in ASD, but little is known about how these atypicalities influence speech perception. We examined the influence of contextual information (lexical, spectral, and temporal) on phoneme categorization of people with ASD and in typically developed (TD) people. Across three experiments, we found that people with ASD used all types of contextual information for disambiguating speech sounds to the same extent as TD; yet they exhibited a shallower identification curve when phoneme categorization required temporal processing. Overall, the results suggest that the observed atypicalities in speech perception in ASD, including the reduced sensitivity observed here, cannot be attributed merely to the limited ability to utilize context during speech perception.

Age-related differences in speech perception have been shown in previous cross-sectional studies to be related to auditory temporal processing. We examined this association in both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, controlling for age-related changes in hearing sensitivity and cognitive ability. Fifty-eight participants were tested in two phases. In phase 1, ages ranged between 22 and 82 years. Phase 2 occurred seven years later. In both phases, participants performed auditory processing tasks, speech perception tests, and cognitive tasks. In both phases, age correlated with hearing level, auditory temporal processing thresholds, word recognition accuracy in noise, and compressed speech. Auditory temporal processing thresholds were correlated with word recognition accuracy in narrowband noise and compressed speech. Longitudinal analysis showed significant decreases in performance from phase 1 to phase 2 in hearing level, dichotic TOJ thresholds, and word recognition accuracy. Steeper slopes were observed in phase 2 than in phase 1 for correlations between age, hearing level, and word recognition accuracy in narrowband noise, but not for age and dichotic TOJ thresholds. Generalized estimating equations revealed an overall decrease in word recognition accuracy from phase 1 to phase 2; this decrease was larger for older participants. Increases in dichotic TOJ and gap detection thresholds were associated with a decrease over time in speech in narrowband and broadband noise, and compressed speech, even when adjusted for age, hearing level, and cognitive ability. These results show that both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs yield similar significant associations between temporal processing and speech perception, even when adjusted for hearing level and cognitive ability.

Objective(s) Enormous variability in speech recognition outcomes persists in adults who receive cochlear implants (CIs), which leads to a barrier to progress in predicting outcomes before surgery, explaining “poor” outcomes, and determining how to provide tailored rehabilitation therapy for individual CI users. The primary goal of my research program over the past 9 years has been to extend our understanding of the contributions of “top‐down” cognitive‐linguistic skills to CI outcomes in adults, acknowledging that “bottom‐up” sensory processes also contribute substantially. The main objective of this invited narrative review is to provide an overview of this work. A secondary objective is to provide career “guidance points” to budding surgeon‐scientists in Otolaryngology. Methods A narrative, chronological review covers work done by our group to explore top‐down and bottom‐up processing in adult CI outcomes. A set of ten guidance points is also provided to assist junior Otolaryngology surgeon‐scientists. Results Work in our lab has identified substantial contributions of cognitive skills (working memory, inhibition‐concentration, speed of lexical access, nonverbal reasoning, verbal learning and memory) as well as linguistic abilities (acoustic cue‐weighting, phonological sensitivity) to speech recognition outcomes in adults with CIs. These top‐down skills interact with the quality of the bottom‐up input. Conclusion Although progress has been made in understanding speech recognition variability in adult CI users, future work is needed to predict CI outcomes before surgery, to identify particular patients' strengths and weaknesses, and to tailor rehabilitation approaches for individual CI users. Level of Evidence 4 Enormous variability in speech recognition outcomes persists in adults who receive cochlear implants (CIs), which leads to a barrier to progress in predicting outcomes before surgery, explaining “poor” outcomes, and determining how to provide tailored rehabilitation therapy for individual CI users. The primary goal of my research program over the past nine years has been to extend our understanding of the contributions of “top‐down” cognitive‐linguistic skills to CI outcomes in adults, acknowledging that “bottom‐up” sensory processes also contribute substantially. The main objective of this invited narrative review is to provide an overview of this work, and a secondary objective is to provide career “guidance points” to budding surgeon‐scientists in Otolaryngology.

The sense of touch is initiated by stimulation of peripheral mechanoreceptors, and then the spatio-temporal pattern of the receptors' activation is interpreted by central cortical processing. To explore the tactile central processing, we psychophysically studied human judgments of the temporal relationships between two tactile events occurring at different skin locations. We examined four types of two-point temporal judgments—simultaneity, temporal order, apparent motion, and inter-stimulus interval—which differ from one another in time scale and task requirement. To perform any of the four temporal judgment tasks, the brain has to integrate spatially separated inputs. The main focus of the present study is to examine how the spatial separation affects the temporal judgment tasks. Two spatial coordinates can be defined in touch: the somatotopic coordinate, defined by cortical topography, and the spatiotopic coordinate, defined in the environment. In our experiments, the somatotopic distance was manipulated by stimulating the middle and index fingers of the same hand or different hands (ipsilateral vs. bilateral conditions), while the spatiotopic distance was manipulated by increasing the stimulators' separation under bilateral conditions (bilateral-near vs. bilateral-far conditions). Our results clearly demonstrated that all four of the temporal judgments were significantly affected by the somatotopic distance, but only slightly by the spatiotopic distance. The present results, together with the previous findings, suggest that tactile temporal judgments in a wide range of time scale, from several to several 100 ms, primarily reflect processing at the level of somatotopic representation unless the performance is further constrained by spatial processing.