Neural Representation of Episodic Time

Abstract

Inspired by recent discoveries of neural populations that track time for specific moments (time cells) and elapsed durations (temporal context and periodic time cells), this review, based on a minisymposium presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, brings together macro-, meso-, and micro-scale neural evidence to formulate hypotheses about how episodic time—the tracking and organizing of events in time as we experience, store, and retrieve them from memory—is coded and processed in the mammalian brain. We also discuss computational principles and relationships to other related phenomena such as memory replay and emotional states.