Metacognitive evaluation of the duration of our actions: behavioral, electrophysiological and interference approaches – MetaTime

Being able to correctly evaluate our own actions is essential both in everyday life but also in learning situations. The current project focusses on a particular parameter of our actions, namely their durations. Indeed, in many situations (playing music, sport activities etc.) the duration of our actions is critical. Being abale to detect whether the just produced durations are the correct ones is essential for learning.
In this project, several questions will be adressed. First, we will assess the relative contributions of decisional (when to act?) and motor execution processes. To do so, the electromyographic activity of the muscles involved in the response will be recorded. Then, we will search for the cerebral markers of this subjectie evaluation of our actions durations. The discovery, thanks to electroencephalography (EEG), of a brain activity whose amplitude co-varies with response accuracy, allowed to objectivize the evaluation process. We will assess whether this activity varies with the objectively produced responses, or with their subjective evaluation. Finally, in order to better establish the causality between this activity (and the underlying cerebral structure generating this activity) and subjective evaluation, we will use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation which allows to disrupt, for a few tens of milliseconds and in a completely reversible manner, the functionning of the stimulated cerebral structure. To do so, some technological developpment will be necessary in order to detect in real time the onset of the electromyographic activity, and to trigger the stimulation time-locked to this onset. Two situations will be studied: time production tasks in which the temporal dimension is explicit, and "reaction time" tasks in which time is not a parameter to directly be controled.