Entrainment and maintenance of an internal metronome in supplementary motor area

Abstract

To prepare timely motor actions, we constantly predict future events. Regularly repeating events are often perceived as a rhythm to which we can readily synchronize our movements, just as in dancing to music. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying the capacity to encode and maintain rhythms are not understood. We trained nonhuman primates to maintain the rhythm of a visual metronome of diverse tempos and recorded neural activity in the supplementary motor area (SMA). SMA exhibited rhythmic bursts of gamma band (30–40 Hz) reflecting an internal tempo that matched the extinguished visual metronome. Moreover, gamma amplitude increased throughout the trial, providing an estimate of total elapsed time. Notably, the timing of gamma bursts and firing rate modulations allowed predicting whether monkeys were ahead or behind the correct tempo. Our results indicate that SMA uses dynamic motor plans to encode a metronome for rhythms and a stopwatch for total elapsed time.