Intrinsic interval timing, not temporal prediction, underlies ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortex, during passive behavior

Neural activity following regular sensory events can reflect either elapsed time since the previous event (temporal signaling) or temporal predictions and prediction errors about the next event (temporal predictive processing). These mechanisms are often confounded, yet dissociating them is essential for understanding neural circuit computations. We addressed this by performing two-photon calcium imaging from distinct cell types (excitatory, VIP and SST) in layer 2/3 of visual (VIS) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC), while awake mice passively viewed audio-visual stimuli under temporal contexts with different inter-stimulus interval (ISI) distributions. Computational modeling revealed distinct functional clusters of neurons, including stimulus-activated (ramp-down) and stimulus-inhibited (ramp-up) categories, with distinct kinetics and area/cell-type biases. Importantly, all functional clusters were invariant to temporal predictability, shifted immediately when temporal statistics changed, and were identical between naive and experienced mice. Population decoding revealed that clusters with heterogeneous kinetics differed in how well they represented interval information, such that together they tiled elapsed time and produced a distributed, learning-independent population code for time. These results provide strong evidence against temporal predictive processing in Vis/PPC under passive conditions and instead demonstrate intrinsic coding of interval timing, redefining the mechanistic origin of ramping and omission-related activity in sensory cortex. We discuss how these dynamics align with stimulus-reset attractor frameworks, and propose that temporal predictive processing is more likely implemented in other circuits or recruited in Vis/PPC during task-engaged behavior.