Studies on sound duration discrimination in rodents have consistently reported extraordinarily higher (approx. 2-3x) threshold levels compared to humans and other primates. This finding sharply contrasts with the notion of high temporal precision being a general hallmark of mammalian auditory processing, and raises the question: what other factors might be causing the reported high perceptual thresholds? Here, we investigate duration discrimination in gerbils using the Sensory Island Task (SIT, Ferreiro et al. 2020, Fig. 1A). This paradigm combines closed-loop auditory feedback during self-motion with natural free exploratory behavior, offering a more naturalistic way of probing perception and auditory processing. We tested 6 gerbils with two different reference durations - 50ms and 90ms -, using both low and high frequency pure tone stimulation (660Hz and 10kHz, Fig. 1B). Remarkably, we observed that the animals could discriminate sounds that differed by only 5 to ~20ms in duration (Weber fractions 0.1-0.3) consistently across the tested reference durations and frequencies (Fig. 1C). This precision in duration discrimination is considerably higher than previous reports in rodents and approaches human perceptual levels. To investigate potential neural processing motifs behind this superb perceptual precision, we conducted chronic extracellular recordings in the auditory cortex while the animals performed the task. Preliminary results show significant modulation of neural responses by the task-relevant duration change of the sounds, suggesting a neural correlate of the observed behavioral sensitivity on the early cortical level (Fig. 1D). Together, our findings provide valuable insights into the neural underpinnings of auditory perception during naturalistic behavior.