James Heys

University of Utah, UT·Neuroscience·Early-career

Knowing how long something lasts, over seconds to minutes, is a basic skill for learning, predicting outcomes and figuring out cause and effect. Scientists understand fairly well how the brain tracks very short times (milliseconds) and daily rhythms (hours).

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Fields

Neuroscience

Psychology

Biology

Topics

interval timing

time perception

time cells

Grants

3 known grants, through Mar 2028

What they work on

Test whether axons (nerve fibers) from the anterior cingulate cortex that end in the medial entorhinal cortex carry a clock-like signal of elapsed time, using large-scale optical imaging in mice performing virtual-reality timing tasks.
Determine whether medial entorhinal cortex merges timing input from the anterior cingulate cortex with spatial input, and identify the synaptic and dendritic mechanisms of this merging, by imaging and manipulating synapses and dendrites in behaving mice.
Test whether lateral entorhinal cortex activity is needed to align medial entorhinal 'time cell' sequences and to learn timing, by manipulating LEC in mice trained to report stimuli of non-matching durations.
Record the lateral and medial entorhinal cortex at the same time during timing behavior to see whether they encode elapsed time independently or as one integrated circuit.
Test whether medial entorhinal cortex stays necessary after learning for flexible, rapidly learned timing tasks but not for repetitive ones, which may shift to the dorsal striatum, using causal neural manipulations in mice.
Track how medial entorhinal cortex activity changes as mice learn rapid, flexible timing behavior, using cellular-resolution imaging of thousands of neurons.

More about the research

The middle range, called interval timing, is much less understood. These projects study how the entorhinal cortex, a brain region involved in memory and navigation, helps mice keep track of elapsed time. The team uses virtual-reality timing tasks together with optical imaging that can record from thousands of individual neurons at once. Earlier, the PI discovered "time cells" in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC). These neurons fire at specific moments during a timed interval. The PI also showed that MEC is critical while mice learn timing behavior. The three grants ask where MEC gets its timing signal, how it works with neighboring regions, and when it is needed.

Why it matters

Altered sense of time is a feature of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia. Memory problems in Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia have been proposed to stem from disrupted timing in the brain. Identifying the specific circuits and cellular mechanisms that let the brain encode seconds-to-minutes durations could guide therapies that target these mechanisms in patients with these disorders.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

An Integrated Circuit Model for Temporal Coding in Lateral and Medial Entorhinal Cortex

NIH · Mar 2026 – Mar 2028

CAREER: A multiple memory systems approach to understand interval timing

NSF · Apr 2022 – Mar 2027

Uncovering the neural circuit and synaptic mechanisms underlying interval timing

NIH · Sep 2021 – Aug 2026

Closest labs

John H Freeman

University of Iowa, IA·Neuroscience

Record spikes and local field potentials with multiple tetrodes in the anterior cingulate cortex, dorsal hippocampus, and cerebellum of rats during trace conditioning, to test whether these regions interact in both directions throughout learning.

David Tank

Princeton University, NJ·Neuroscience

Identify which task features (active navigation, passive navigation, or visual stimulation) produce sequential neural activity, by recording from relevant mouse brain regions during tasks that isolate each feature.

Scott Wilke

University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Neuroscience

Record how anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) neurons and ACC-to-nucleus accumbens projection neurons represent effort-related costs and benefits during choices, using miniature head-mounted microscopes in freely behaving animals.

The school

University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.

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