Entorhinal grid-like signals reflect temporal context for human timing behavior

An important ability for successful interaction with the environment is the estimation of magnitudes such as the duration of an event. To improve duration estimates, the brain must compensate for sensory uncertainty, which it does by encoding the statistical regularities that link co-occurring stimuli and tasks (i.e., temporal context). The entorhinal cortex (EC) supports the encoding of such task regularities, which has been suggested to rely on grid cells that the EC is known to harbor. On population level, grid cells exhibit a six-fold rotational symmetry as a function of gaze direction, which is thought to be measurable with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Here, we therefore tested whether temporal context modulates grid-like fMRI activity in the human EC, and characterized in detail its relationship to behavioral performance in a time-to-contact (TTC) estimation task. We indeed found that EC activity signaled the accuracy as well as biases in timing behavior, and that grid-like activity reflected timing errors consistent with temporal-context encoding. Importantly, our findings are well explained by Bayesian models of time perception, suggesting that the human EC contributes to adapting internal timing mechanisms to the temporal statistics of the environment.