Abstract
Subjective estimates of elapsed time are sensitive to the fluctuations in an emotional state. While it is well known that dangerous and threatening situations, such as electric shocks or loud noises, are perceived as lasting longer than safe events, it remains unclear whether anticipating a threatening event speeds up or slows down subjective time and what defines the direction of the distortion. We examined whether the anticipation of uncertain visual aversive events resulted in either underestimation or overestimation of perceived duration. The participants did a temporal bisection task, where they estimated durations of visual cues relative to previously learnt long and short standard durations. The colour of the to-be-timed visual cue signalled either a 50% or 0% probability of encountering an aversive image at the end of the interval. The cue durations were found to be overestimated due to anticipation of aversive images, even when no image was shown afterwards. Moreover, the overestimation was more pronounced in people who reported feeling more anxious while anticipating the image. These results demonstrate that anxiogenic anticipation of uncertain visual threats induce temporal overestimation, which questions a recently proposed view that temporal underestimation evoked by uncertain threats is due to anxiety.
Highlights
Perception of time is flexible and fluctuates alongside our internal states, sensory feedback, and situational demands (Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009; Wittmann, 2009)
We examined whether anticipation of aversive visual stimuli distorts estimation of temporal durations and whether this distortion is due to anxiety elicited by the anticipated threat
We found that anticipating an aversive visual stimulus leads to an overestimation of the elapsed time and that those reporting higher levels of anxiety when expecting the picture exhibited a generally greater temporal overestimation
Summary
Perception of time is flexible and fluctuates alongside our internal states, sensory feedback, and situational demands (Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009; Wittmann, 2009). A good example of this flexibility can be found in introspective accounts of how time seems to slow down in threatening situations, such as a car accident or a free fall (Noyes & Kletti, 1972; Stetson et al, 2007) This often-reported experience resonates with decades of laboratory work, which shows that fear-provoking and aversive stimuli are perceived to last longer than neutral or positively valenced stimuli of the same duration (Droit-Volet et al, 2010; Tipples, 2008, 2011). The vast majority of studies demonstrating the threatinduced temporal overestimation explain the effect in terms of the so-called pacemaker–accumulator device, which is laid out in the scalar expectancy theory (Gibbon, 1977) According to this framework, timing relies on a combination of a pacemaker emitting pulses, an accumulator that collects them, and a switch process that regulates the accumulation. Arousing events are thought to speed up the pacemaker through increased arousal, which results in faster accumulation of pulses and greater estimates of elapsed time (Droit‐Volet et al, 2004, see Lake et al, 2016a, 2016b for review)
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