Abstract
We investigated whether Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) indicated the subjective dilation of time when judging the duration of arousing stimuli. Participants performed a visual temporal bisection task along with high-level and low-level arousing auditory stimuli, while we simultaneously recorded EEG. In accordance with previous studies, arousing stimuli were temporally overestimated and led to higher EPN amplitude. Yet, we observed that time dilation and EPN amplitude were significantly correlated and this effect cannot be explained by confounds from stimulus valence. We interpret our findings in terms of the pacemaker–accumulator model of human timing, and suggest that EPN indicates an arousal-based increasing of the speed of our mental clock.
Highlights
Perceiving time is a crucial prerequisite for responding adaptively in our everyday lives
In behavioral timing performance as well as in EEG data, we looked at the contrast between low and high arousal conditions
To assess whether the arousal manipulation resulted in a meaningful difference in behavior, we compared the point of subjective equality (PSE) within subjects between both conditions (Table 2)
Summary
Perceiving time is a crucial prerequisite for responding adaptively in our everyday lives. Like most species, possess the ability to time intervals with substantial accuracy, our time estimations are not perfect. Timing context or the properties of the timed event can lead to under- or overestimation. Well-established factors leading to such timing biases include, for example, environments requiring attention to secondary assignments (Macar et al 1994), or time intervals marked by emotion-inducing stimuli (Droit-Volet and Meck 2007). Systematic distortions of timing are commonly explained by the so-called Pacemaker–Accumulator model (PA, Buhusi and Meck 2005). According to the PA model, an internal clock processes temporal information through three stages: a clock, a memory, and a decision stage. When we direct our attention to timing a currently running interval, the switch
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