Abstract
Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time perception, perception-action integration theories suggest motor processes are central to the experience of the passage of time. We investigated whether sensory information and motor activity may interactively affect the perception of the passage of time. Two prospective timing tasks involved timing a visual stimulus display conveying optical flow at increasing or decreasing velocity. While doing the timing tasks, participants were instructed to imagine themselves moving at increasing or decreasing speed, independently of the optical flow. In the direct-estimation task, the duration of the visual display was explicitly judged in seconds while in the motor-timing task, participants were asked to keep a constant pace of tapping. The direct-estimation task showed imagining accelerating movement resulted in relative overestimation of time, or time dilation, while decelerating movement elicited relative underestimation, or time compression. In the motor-timing task, imagined accelerating movement also accelerated tapping speed, replicating the time-dilation effect. The experiments show imagined movement affects time perception, suggesting a causal role of simulated motor activity. We argue that imagined movements and optical flow are integrated by temporal unfolding of sensorimotor contingencies. Consequently, as physical time is relative to spatial motion, so too is perception of time relative to imaginary motion.
Highlights
Time is a fundamental physical dimension, yet its subjective experience is surprisingly flexible and affected by perception, cognition, and emotion
In the confirmatory part of the analysis, a repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted on the estimated time (s) with presentation time (7, 10, and 16 s), optical flow, and imagery as factors
Fast optical flow enhanced the effect of imagery, with the difference between accelerating and decelerating imagery being larger in fast than in slow optical flow conditions (D = 0.56 s, see Fig. 3)
Summary
Time is a fundamental physical dimension, yet its subjective experience is surprisingly flexible and affected by perception, cognition, and emotion. The theory accounts for systematic timing errors as arising from either a change of the pacemaker’s rate, or due to attentional resource allocation to the timing task It explains temporal dilation effects of threatening stimuli as an increased pace of the internal clock (Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009) and of oddballs as increased attention towards temporal processing (Tse et al, 2004). While models such as the pacemaker-accumulator ascribe a central place in cognitive processing to timing, several observations suggest motor processes do affect temporal perception. If the mental imagination were to affect time perception, this would show motor simulation affects subjective time
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