Entrainment and maintenance of an internal metronome in premotor cortex

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 different tempos and then we 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 and provided an estimate of total elapsed time. Notably, the timing and amplitude of gamma bursts reflected systematic timing biases and errors in the behavioral responses. Our results indicate that premotor areas use dynamic motor plans to encode a metronome for rhythms and a stopwatch for total elapsed time.