Abstract
Time, space and numbers are closely linked in the physical world. However, the relativistic-like effects on time perception of spatial and magnitude factors remain poorly investigated. Here we wanted to investigate whether duration judgments of digit visual stimuli are biased depending on the side of space where the stimuli are presented and on the magnitude of the stimulus itself. Different groups of healthy subjects performed duration judgment tasks on various types of visual stimuli. In the first two experiments visual stimuli were constituted by digit pairs (1 and 9), presented in the centre of the screen or in the right and left space. In a third experiment visual stimuli were constituted by black circles. The duration of the reference stimulus was fixed at 300 ms. Subjects had to indicate the relative duration of the test stimulus compared with the reference one. The main results showed that, regardless of digit magnitude, duration of stimuli presented in the left hemispace is underestimated and that of stimuli presented in the right hemispace is overestimated. On the other hand, in midline position, duration judgments are affected by the numerical magnitude of the presented stimulus, with time underestimation of stimuli of low magnitude and time overestimation of stimuli of high magnitude. These results argue for the presence of strict interactions between space, time and magnitude representation on the human brain.
Highlights
Time perception is fundamental to many aspects of our lives
Duration perception of spatially lateralized stimuli was still influenced by numerical magnitude: bisection points were significantly shorter when the test stimulus was the digit 9 as compared with digit 1, either in the right space or in the left space
The current findings suggest that, as in the physical world, psychological time is relative and elastic
Summary
Time perception is fundamental to many aspects of our lives. Most scientists agree that the explicit study of time falls in the purview of physics, yet time is an integral part of virtually all psychological phenomena. Classical models [1,6] suggest that using multiple switches and accumulators an organism could quantify time and number simultaneously These models have been revised to postulate that numerical and temporal integration may be carried out by a distributed neural circuit that includes cortical areas activated by both timing and counting tasks [7]. Much work has shown that for the brain time and space are not processed separately but can influence each other strongly [9,10]. We used different ordered materials (temporal and numerical) in the same task to test whether relativistic-like effects could compress and expand perceptual time according to two factors: the magnitude of the stimulus; the side of space where a visual stimulus is presented
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