Reply to Namboodiri and Hussain Shuler: Analysis of scaling of neuronal activities in medial prefrontal cortex during interval timing

Namboodiri and Hussain Shuler (1) propose an alternative explanation for the timing-related firing rate modulation of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) neurons, suggesting that our finding can be simply explained by mPFC neuronal activity evoked by port exit (2). To illustrate their argument, the authors describe a thought experiment in which a flash of light is presented to the animal at the time of port exit. The authors predict that the visually evoked responses, when aligned to the sound onset and averaged across trials, will give rise to peri-event time histogram with an apparent scaling property because of the scaled variability of exit …