Animals process temporal information in an ever-changing environment, but the neuronal
mechanisms of this process, especially on timescales longer than seconds, remain
unresolved. Here, we designed a hippocampus-dependent task in which rats prospectively
increased their reward-seeking behavior over a duration of minutes. During this timing
behavior, hippocampal and striatal neurons represented successive time points on the order
of minutes by gradually changing their firing rates and transiently increasing their firing rates …

Animals process temporal information in an ever-changing environment, but the neuronal
mechanisms of this process, especially on timescales longer than seconds, remain
unresolved. Here, we designed a hippocampus-dependent task in which rats prospectively
increased their reward-seeking behavior over a duration of minutes. During this timing
behavior, hippocampal and striatal neurons represented successive time points on the order
of minutes. These minute-encoding patterns progressively developed as the rats learned a …