Distortion of time interval reproduction in an epileptic patient with a focal lesion in the right anterior insular/inferior frontal cortices
Neuropsychologia. 2014-11-01; 64: 184-194
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.09.004
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1. Neuropsychologia. 2014 Nov;64:184-94. doi:
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.09.004. Epub 2014 Sep 16.
Distortion of time interval reproduction in an epileptic patient with a focal
lesion in the right anterior insular/inferior frontal cortices.
Monfort V(1), Pfeuty M(2), Klein M(1), Collé S(1), Brissart H(3), Jonas J(3),
Maillard L(4).
Author information:
(1)University of Lorraine, LCOMS, EA 7306, Rue du Général Delestraint, Metz
F-57070, France.
(2)University of Bordeaux, INCIA, UMR 5287, F-33000 Bordeaux, France. Electronic
address: .
(3)University Hospital of Nancy, Department of Neurology, 29 avenue du
Maréchal-de-Lattre-de-Tassigny, Nancy F-54035, France.
(4)University Hospital of Nancy, Department of Neurology, 29 avenue du
Maréchal-de-Lattre-de-Tassigny, Nancy F-54035, France; Faculté de Médecine de
Nancy, Université de Lorraine, France; Université de Lorraine, UMR 7039, CNRS,
France.
This case report on an epileptic patient suffering from a focal lesion at the
junction of the right anterior insular cortex (AIC) and the adjacent inferior
frontal cortex (IFC) provides the first evidence that damage to this brain
region impairs temporal performance in a visual time reproduction task in which
participants had to reproduce the presentation duration (3, 5 and 7s) of
emotionally-neutral and -negative pictures. Strikingly, as compared to a group
of healthy subjects, the AIC/IFC case considerably overestimated reproduction
times despite normal variability. The effect was obtained in all duration and
emotion conditions. Such a distortion in time reproduction was not observed in
four other epileptic patients without insular or inferior frontal damage.
Importantly, the absolute extent of temporal over-reproduction increased in
proportion to the magnitude of the target durations, which concurs with the
scalar property of interval timing, and points to an impairment of time-specific
rather than of non temporal (such as motor) mechanisms. Our data suggest that
the disability in temporal reproduction of the AIC/IFC case would result from a
distorted memory representation of the encoded duration, occurring during the
process of storage and/or of recovery from memory and leading to a deviation of
the temporal judgment during the reproduction task. These findings support the
recent proposal that the anterior insular/inferior frontal cortices would be
involved in time interval representation.
Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.09.004
PMID: 25223467 [Indexed for MEDLINE]