Table 1.

Orbitofrontal Cortex in Temporal Cognition

Process/Task	Description	Species	Method	Finding
Explicit Timing	Discriminating between time intervals of different lengths	Humans Rodents	Optogenetic inhibition, electrophysiological recordings	Inhibition of OFC impairs the ability to discriminate between two intervals. Population recordings in OFC show neural code for elapsed time
Implicit Timing*	Learning the temporal structure of a task improves subsequent performance	Humans	Psychophysics	Enhanced performance when the stimulus-target interval matches the expected interval
Temporal Discounting	Choosing between a smaller, sooner vs. larger, later reward	Humans Monkeys Rodents	Lesions, transient inactivations, and electrophysiological recordings	OFC lesions mostly result in delay-aversion; mixed results depend on experience integrating reward magnitude and time, and presence of cues
Temporal Wagering	Post-decision waiting for reward vs. aborting/reinitiating the trial	Humans Monkeys Rodents	Lesions, transient inactivations, and electrophysiological recordings	OFC inactivation impairs willingness-to-wait (decision confidence) without affecting decision accuracy
Temporal Distributions	Discriminating different delay distributions	Rodents	Lesions	OFC lesions produce a decreased ability to accurately represent variability in reward outcomes

^*No known experiments specifically testing the role of OFC in implicit timing.