Abstract
The aim of the present study was to examine how visual emotional content could orchestrate time perception. The experimental design allowed us to single out the share of emotion in the specific processing of content-bearing pictures, i.e., real-life scenes. Two groups of participants had to reproduce the duration (2, 4, or 6 s) of content-deprived stimuli (gray squares) or differentially valenced content-bearing stimuli, which included neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant pictures (International Affective Pictures Systems). Results showed that the effect of content differed according to duration: at 2 s, the reproduced duration was longer for content-bearing than content-deprived stimuli, but the difference between the two types of stimuli decreased as duration increased and was not significant for the longest duration (6 s). At 4 s, emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) stimuli were judged longer than neutral pictures. Furthermore, whatever the duration, the precision of the reproduction was greater for non-emotional than emotional stimuli (pleasant and unpleasant). These results suggest a dissociation within content effect on timing in the visual modality: relative overestimation of all content-bearing pictures limited to short durations (2 s), and delayed overestimation of emotional relative to neutral pictures at 4 s, as well as a lesser precision in the temporal judgment of emotional pictures whatever the duration. Our results underline the relevance for time perception models to integrate two ways of assessing timing in relationship with emotion: accuracy and precision.
Highlights
The literature on time perception contains many examples showing that subjective time is greatly modulated by stimulus features
Evidence suggests that auditory stimuli are judged longer and with greater precision than visual stimuli of equal duration and these findings have generally been interpreted in the framework of the scalar expectancy theory (Gibbon et al, 1984; Penney and Tourret, 2005; Droit-Volet et al, 2007; Noulhiane et al, 2008). This latter considers the model of an internal clock composed of three stages (1) a clock, i.e., a switch opening at the beginning of a temporal event and closing at the end of it, and a pacemaker generating pulses, (2) an accumulator stocking pulses throughout the event, (3) a comparator computing the difference between the accumulated number of pulses in working memory and a known duration in reference memory. In this interpretation the modality effect is mainly located at the clock stage: either because the pacemaker is faster in the auditory modality (Wearden et al, 1998, 2006; Droit-Volet et al, 2004b), or because the switch flickers more in the visual modality, more pulses are accumulated with sounds than lights auditory signals seem longer than visual stimuli of equivalent duration (Collier and Logan, 2000; Penney et al, 2000; Droit-Volet et al, 2007)
This study aimed at investigating the influence of visual emotional content on time perception
Summary
The literature on time perception contains many examples showing that subjective time is greatly modulated by stimulus features. Evidence suggests that auditory stimuli are judged longer and with greater precision than visual stimuli of equal duration and these findings have generally been interpreted in the framework of the scalar expectancy theory (Gibbon et al, 1984; Penney and Tourret, 2005; Droit-Volet et al, 2007; Noulhiane et al, 2008) This latter considers the model of an internal clock composed of three stages (1) a clock, i.e., a switch opening at the beginning of a temporal event and closing at the end of it, and a pacemaker generating pulses, (2) an accumulator stocking pulses throughout the event, (3) a comparator computing the difference between the accumulated number of pulses in working memory and a known duration in reference memory. A last feature of interest concerns the influence of emotion on time perception
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