Abstract
Previous research has consistently reported that pain related stimuli are perceived as lasting longer than non-pain related ones, suggesting that pain lengthens subjective time. However, to date, the investigation has been limited to the immediate effects of pain on time perception. The current study aims to investigate whether pain affects how a duration is recalled after a period of delay. In two experiments, participants were asked to complete four temporal generalisation tasks, where they were required first to remember the duration of a standard tone (learning phase) and then to compare the standard duration to a series of comparison durations (testing phase). Using a 2 × 2 design, the four tasks differed in terms of whether participants were exposed to a painful or non-painful stimulus during the learning phase, and whether the testing phase started immediately or 15 min after the learning phase. Participants were exposed to low pain in Experiment 1 and high pain in Experiment 2. Two possible results were expected: pain could decrease temporal accuracy, because pain disrupts cognitive processes required for accurate timing, or pain could increase temporal accuracy, because pain facilitates memory consolidation. Contrary to expectations, results from both Experiments indicated that participants’ temporal performances were similar in the pain and no-pain conditions when testing occurred 15 min after the learning phase. Findings, therefore, suggest that pain neither disrupts nor enhances long-term memory representations of duration.
Highlights
Temporal distortions pervade our daily experience and are well evidenced in laboratory studies
In a temporal bisection task, which involved categorising a series of comparison durations as more similar to a previously learnt short or long duration, participants gave longer temporal judgments in trials that included the presentation of an electric shock
The results of Experiment 1 suggest that memory for the duration was largely unaffected when a low level of pain was experienced during the encoding of temporal information. This was confirmed by the absence of the effect of low pain on the measures of response accuracy, response variability and Full Width at HalfMaximum (FWHM)
Summary
Temporal distortions pervade our daily experience and are well evidenced in laboratory studies. Numerous variables have the capacity to distort the perceived duration of events. Duration is subjectively shortened by positive stimuli (e.g., Ogden et al, 2015) and shameful facial expressions (e.g., Gil & Droit-volet, 2011). In particular, has shown the most distorting effects on time perception (e.g., Rey et al, 2017). Numerous studies show that pain distorts perceptions of time. The effect of pain on perceived duration has a magnitude that is typically greater than that observed for negatively valenced visual and auditory stimuli (Gil & Droit-Volet, 2011; Ogden, Moore, et al, 2014; Ogden, Wearden, & Montgomery, 2014). The extent of temporal distortions due to a painful stimulus increases with pain intensity (Piovesan et al, 2019)
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