Affect Time Perception Research Articles

A matter of time: how musical training affects time perception.

Musical training has been linked to changes in early attentional and perceptual processing. Thus, such an altered attentional and perceptual processing has enabled musicians to judge the duration differently than non-musicians. Although these claims seem intriguing, there are many questions that are not addressed yet, for example, how would the performance of musically-trained differ from that of untrained on visual and auditory temporal judgments? Is there any advantage to musically-trained person in temporal processing? To understand these questions, we thus conducted a series of Auditory and Visual Temporal Bisection Tasks on 32 musically-trained and 32 musically-untrained participants. We hypothesized that if music training modulates general sensitivity to temporal dimensions, then the temporal judgments of musically-trained participants would differ from those of untrained participants in both visual and auditory tasks. Each participant performed a total of 140 trials (70 visual and 70 auditory) in two different blocks. For each participant, a Point of Subjective Equality (PSE) was obtained for visual and auditory conditions. The findings revealed a significant modality effect on time perception, with auditory stimuli being consistently overestimated compared to visual stimuli. Surprisingly, the musically-trained group exhibited a tendency to underestimate duration relative to the musically-untrained participants. Although these results may appear counterintuitive at first glance, a detailed analysis indicates that the length of musical training plays a significant role in modulating temporal processing within the musically-trained group.

Variation in cognitive investment: making time fly… or drag!

Social media is increasingly prevalent in the daily lives of young people as a source of entertainment and social interaction. However, the time spent on such stimuli reduces availability for other activities that used to be more prevalent, such as reading, development of motor skills, and face-to-face social interaction. Little is known about the effects of this habit changes on the cognitive development of young individuals. One possible way to assess cognitive investment in a particular task is through the perception of time passage. In the present study, we investigated the cognitive investment in different activities and its relationship with the perception of time passage in young individuals aged 14 to 15 years old. Four groups of volunteers were formed. Each group performed a different activity for 23 minutes. Group 1 spent the 23 minutes browsing a social network (TikTok); Group 2 read classics of Brazilian literature; Group 3 played the board game “Pictionary”; and Group 4 was instructed to practice a complex pen spinning around the fingers. The duration of the activity was not disclosed, and at the end of the 23 minutes, volunteers were individually asked how much time they thought had passed during the activity. The group that engaged in TikTok had an average perception of 20 minutes, a value almost identical to the pen spinning, which was 19 minutes, with no statistically significant difference between them (p > 0.05). On the other hand, activities requiring greater cognitive effort and social interaction, such as reading and the board game, had average time perceptions of 25 and 28 minutes, respectively. The latter two even reached time perception values of 40 and 44 minutes, which were the highest in the entire experiment. According to analysis of variance, groups with the lowest mean time perception (TikTok and pen spinning) were significantly different from the board game group (p < 0.05). Based on our results, we can conclude that the nature of the activity undertaken affects time perception on the brain. This may be related to the amount of new information presented and absorbed during novelty and learning activities. Engaging in new and cognitive demanding experiences give the impression that time lasted longer. Conversely, repetitive activities without new stimuli give the sensation that the same time interval seems shorter. Further studies investigating the consequences of overexposure to repetitive and unstimulating activities are necessary to understand their potential effects on the brain development of adolescents.

The role of attention in the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception.

Recent research has indicated that attractive faces often cause a dilation of our time perception thus affecting physical and mental health, and speculates that this could be relevant to the fact that attractive faces capture people's attention.Nevertheless, there was no direct experimental data to support this speculation. The present work was designed to illustrate how attention affects time perception of facial attractiveness. It utilized two experiments to investigate this phenomenon. In Experiment 1, perception of timing and attention bias were assessed using a temporal reproduction task and a dot-probe task. Increased attention bias was found to mediate the time dilation effect of facial attractiveness. Experiment 2 adopted dual-task paradigm, combining a temporal reproduction task and attractiveness rating task, to manipulate attention allocation. The findings suggested that allocating more attention to the task requiring timing enhanced the time dilation effect caused by the faces. Results of Experiments 1 and 2 converge to show that attention plays an essential role in the effects of facial attractiveness on time perception.

Genre v. BPM in Time Perception

This paper investigates the impact of music on time perception by examining two factors: genre and beats per minute (BPM) of songs. The study explores whether there is a significant difference in time perception when individuals listen to classical music compared to pop music and how varying song speeds affect time perception. Participants from Conestoga High School were selected through a convenience sample during Unity Fair and were asked to estimate when 15 seconds had elapsed while listening to different songs. The results indicated that there was no significant difference in time perception between classical and pop music. However, there was a significant difference in time perception for songs with different BPMs. The study suggests that song speed plays a more substantial role in affecting time perception than genre. Further exploration of music's impact on cognitive functions and time perception in longer intervals is proposed for future research.

The influence of tonality, tempo, and musical sophistication on the listener's time-duration estimates.

Music listening affects time perception, with previous studies suggesting that a variety of factors may influence this: musical, individual, and environmental. Two experiments investigated the effect of musical factors (tonality and musical tempo) and individual factors (a listener's level of musical sophistication) on subjective estimates of duration. Participants estimated the duration of different versions of newly composed instrumental music stimuli under retrospective and prospective conditions. Stimuli varied in tempo (90-120 bpm) and tonality (tonal-atonal), in a 2 × 2 factorial design, while other musical parameters remained constant. Estimates were made using written estimates of minutes and seconds in Experiment 1, and the reproduction method in Experiment 2. Two-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) showed no main effect of tonality on estimates and no significant interactions between tempo and tonality, under any condition. Musical tempo significantly affected estimates, with the faster tempo leading to longer estimates, but only in the prospective condition, and with the use of the reproduction method. Correlation matrices using the Pearson correlation coefficient found no correlation between musical sophistication scores (measured using the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index [Gold-MSI]) and verbal or reproduction estimates. In conclusion, together with the existing literature, findings suggest that (1) changes in tonality, without further changes in rhythm, metre, or melodic contour, do not significantly affect estimates; (2) small changes in musical tempo influence only prospective reproduction estimates, with larger tempo differences or longer stimuli being needed to cause changes in retrospective estimates; (3) participants' level of musical sophistication does not impact estimates of musical duration; and (4) empirical research on music listening and subjective time must consider potential method-dependent results.

Validating virtual reality for time perception research: Virtual reality changes expectations about the duration of physical processes, but not the sense of time.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) provides a versatile method for investigating human time perception, because it allows the manipulation and control of relevant variables (e.g., the speed of environmental changes) that cannot be modified in the real world. However, an important premise for interpreting the results of VR studies, namely that the method itself does not affect time perception, has received little attention. Here we tested this assumption by comparing timing performance in a real environment and a VR scenario. Participants performed two timing tasks, requiring the production of intervals defined either by numerical values ("eight seconds") or by a physical process ("the time it takes for a bottle to run out when turned over"). We found that the experience of immersive VR exclusively altered judgments about the duration of physical processes, whereas judgments about the duration of abstract time units were unaffected. These results demonstrate that effects of VR on timing performance are not driven by changes in time perception itself, but rather by altered expectations regarding the duration of physical processes. The present study validates the use of VR in time perception research and strengthens the interpretation of changed timing behaviour induced by manipulations within VR.

The effect of 24-hour sleep deprivation on subjective time perception

In this study, we investigated the effect of 24-h total sleep deprivation on subjective time perception. Twenty-five participants aged 18–35 years (13 female and 12 male) were recruited. Time perception and cognitive assessments were performed twice: after a regular night's sleep and following a 24-h sleep deprivation. The retrospective and prospective tasks were used to measure time perception. In order to prevent order effect, the test orders were randomized. The Stroop test and the Wechsler Memory Scale-III were used to evaluate attention, processing speed, and memory. The repeated measures ANOVA was used to examine gender-by-sleep deprivation interactions on time perception. We found that retrospective time perception was significantly prolonged after sleep deprivation (p < 0.05). Women had a shorter prospective time estimation rate after adequate sleep than men, but this difference disappeared after sleep deprivation. The Stroop test showed improvement in cognitive flexibility after sleep deprivation (p < 0.05), and short-term or working memory appeared unaffected by one night of sleep deprivation. There was a negative correlation between sleepiness rate and working memory function in female subgroup. The results suggest that even short-term sleep deprivation can significantly affect time perception, which may have important implications in critical situations.

Modality-dependent distortion effects of temporal frequency on time perception.

Time perception has been known to depend on the temporal frequency of the stimulus. Previously, the effect of temporal frequency modulation was assumed to be monotonically lengthening or shortening. However, this study shows that temporal frequency affects time perception in a non-monotonic and modality-dependent manner. Four experiments investigated the time distortion effects induced by modulation of temporal frequency across auditory and visual modalities. Critically, the temporal frequency was parametrically manipulated across four levels (steady stimulus, 10-, 20-, and 30/40-Hz intermittent auditory/visual stimulus). Experiment 1, 2, and 3 consistently showed that a 10-Hz auditory stimulus was perceived as shorter than a steady auditory stimulus. Meanwhile, as the temporal frequency increased, the perceived duration of the intermittent auditory stimulus was lengthened. A 40-Hz auditory stimulus was perceived as longer than a 10- Hz auditory stimulus, but did not differ significantly from a steady one. Experiment 4 showed that, for the visual modality, a 10-Hz visual stimulus was perceived as longer than a steady stimulus, and the perceived duration was lengthened as temporal frequency increased. This study demonstrated that within the scope of the temporal frequencies examined in this study, there were differential distortion effects observed across sensory modalities.

Dynamic and static angry faces influence time perception differently-Evidence from ERPs.

The dynamic characteristics of facial expressions might affect time perception. Compared with static emotional faces, dynamic emotional faces are more intense, have higher ecological validity, and contain time series information, which may lead to time overestimation. In the present study, we aimed at investigating how dynamic characteristics of angry facial expressions affect time perception, as measured using event-related potentials (ERPs). Dynamic and static angry and neutral faces with different durations (400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1400, and 1600 ms) were presented in the classical temporal bisection paradigm. Participants were asked to judge whether the duration of the presented face was closer to 400 or 1600 ms. The behavioral results showed a significant overestimation effect for dynamic angry faces compared with static faces, both in terms of proportion of long and Bisection Point. The ERP results indicated that the processing mechanisms are significantly different between judging the duration of dynamic and static angry faces. Dynamic angry faces evoked a larger N2 and Late Positive Potential than did static faces, while the static angry faces evoked a larger P2 and Early Posterior Negativity. The Contingent Negative Variation showed a complex change pattern over time. Our results indicate that dynamic angry facial expressions influence time perception differently than do static faces. Static angry faces were processed earlier and were considered to cause an overestimation of time through early emotional arousal and attentional bias, while dynamic angry faces may have caused the overestimation of time through response inhibition and late sustained attention.

Dissociable effects of emotional stimuli on electrophysiological indices of time and decision-making.

Previous research has demonstrated that emotional faces affect time perception, however, the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Earlier attempts focus on effects at the different stages of the pacemaker-accumulator model (clock, memory, and/or decision-making) including, an increase in pacemaker rate or accumulation rate via arousal or attention, respectively, or by biasing decision-making. A visual temporal bisection task with sub-second intervals was conducted in two groups to further investigate these effects; one group was strictly behavioral whereas the second included a 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG). To separate the influence of face and timing responses, participants timed a visual stimulus, temporally flanked (before and after) by two faces, either negative or neutral, creating three trial-types: Neg→Neut, Neut→Neg, or Neut→Neut. We found a leftward shift in bisection point (BP) in Neg→Neut relative to Neut→Neut suggests an overestimation of the temporal stimulus when preceded by a negative face. Neurally, we found the face-responsive N170 was larger for negative faces and the N1 and contingent negative variation (CNV) were larger when the temporal stimulus was preceded by a negative face. Additionally, there was an interaction effect between condition and response for the late positive component of timing (LPCt) and a significant difference between response (short/long) in the neutral condition. We concluded that a preceding negative face affects the clock stage leading to more pulses being accumulated, either through attention or arousal, as indexed by a larger N1, CNV, and N170; whereas viewing a negative face after impacted decision-making mechanisms, as evidenced by the LPCt.

The Blursday database as a resource to study subjective temporalities during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 participants completed at least one task, and 439 participants completed all tasks in the first session. The database and all data collection tools are accessible to researchers for studying the effects of social isolation on temporal information processing, time perspective, decision-making, sleep, metacognition, attention, memory, self-perception and mindfulness. Blursday includes quantitative statistics such as sleep patterns, personality traits, psychological well-being and lockdown indices. The database provides quantitative insights on the effects of lockdown (stringency and mobility) and subjective confinement on time perception (duration, passage of time and temporal distances). Perceived isolation affects time perception, and we report an inter-individual central tendency effect in retrospective duration estimation.

Larger visual changes compress time: The inverted effect of asemantic visual features on interval time perception.

Time perception is fluid and affected by manipulations to visual inputs. Previous literature shows that changes to low-level visual properties alter time judgments at the millisecond-level. At longer intervals, in the span of seconds and minutes, high-level cognitive effects (e.g., emotions, memories) elicited by visual inputs affect time perception, but these effects are confounded with semantic information in these inputs, and are therefore challenging to measure and control. In this work, we investigate the effect of asemantic visual properties (pure visual features devoid of emotional or semantic value) on interval time perception. Our experiments were conducted with binary and production tasks in both conventional and head-mounted displays, testing the effects of four different visual features (spatial luminance contrast, temporal frequency, field of view, and visual complexity). Our results reveal a consistent pattern: larger visual changes all shorten perceived time in intervals of up to 3min, remarkably contrary to their effect on millisecond-level perception. Our findings may help alter participants’ time perception, which can have broad real-world implications.

Time perception in film is modulated by sensory modality and arousal.

Considerable research has shown that theperception of time can be distorted subjectively, but little empirical work has examined what factors affect time perception in film, a naturalistic multimodal stimulus. Here, we explore the effect of sensory modality, arousal, and valence on how participants estimate durations in film. Using behavioral ratings combined with pupillometry in a within-participants design, we analyzed responses to and duration estimates of film clips in three experimental conditions: audiovisual (containing music and sound effects), visual (without music and sound effects), and auditory (music and sound effects without a visual scene). Participants viewed clips from little-known nature documentaries, fiction, animation, and experimental films. They were asked to judge clip duration and to report subjective arousal and valence, as their pupil sizes were recorded. Data were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. Results reveal duration estimates varied between experimental conditions. Clip durations were judged to be shorter than actual durations in all three conditions, with visual-only clips perceived as longer (i.e., less distorted in time) than auditory-only and audiovisual clips. High levels of Composite Arousal (an average of self-reported arousal and pupil size changes) were correlated with longer (more accurate) estimates of duration, particularly in the audiovisual modality. This effect may reflect stimulus complexity or greater cognitive engagement. Increased ratings of valence were correlated with longer estimates of duration. The use of naturalistic, complex stimuli such as film can enhance our understanding of the psychology of time perception.

Time to imagine moving: Simulated motor activity affects time perception

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.

The Intention to Conceal Does Not Always Affect Time Perception.

The display duration of stimuli is overestimated due to the increase in phasic arousal induced by the stimuli or high levels of background arousal. A previous study demonstrated that display duration of items (2 s) was overestimated when a participant attempted to conceal one of the items so as not to be detected in the concealed information test (CIT). As the time perception remained the same between the item to be concealed and the other items, the overestimation was thought to be due to the high level of background arousal under the conceal condition. Duration of 2 s may be too long to examine the phasic arousal effect induced by the concealed item. The present study conducted three online experiments with shorter durations, that is, each of three items was presented with duration of 1, 0.5, and 2 s in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. The participants were instructed to conceal one of the three items under the conceal condition and did not conceal any item in the innocent condition. The difference in time perception between the conceal and innocent conditions or between items under the conceal condition was observed in none of the three experiments. The result indicates that temporal overestimation does not occur when a participant is only concealing an object. Rather, temporal overestimation would occur only when the level of background arousal is amplified by the concealment.

How Facial Attractiveness Affects Time Perception: Increased Arousal Results in Temporal Dilation of Attractive Faces.

Time perception plays a fundamental role in people’s daily life activities, and it is modulated by changes in environmental contexts. Recent studies have observed that attractive faces generally result in temporal dilation and have proposed increased arousal to account for such dilation. However, there is no direct empirical result to evidence such an account. The aim of the current study, therefore, was to clarify the relationship between arousal and the temporal dilation effect of facial attractiveness by introducing a rating of arousal to test the effect of arousal on temporal dilation (Experiment 1) and by regulating arousal via automatic expression suppression to explore the association between arousal and temporal dilation (Experiment 2). As a result, Experiment 1 found that increased arousal mediated the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces; Experiment 2 showed that the downregulation of arousal attenuated the temporal dilation of attractive faces. These results highlighted the role of increased arousal, which is a dominating mechanism of the temporal dilation effect of attractive faces.

A causal view of the sense of agency

ABSTRACT If you expect that your action causes a near effect, you perceive the action and the effect as closer in time than they really are. This phenomenon is called temporal binding and is considered an implicit measure of the sense of agency, namely the sense of being the author of an action or action awareness. Recent studies, however, show that temporal binding occurs even without the agent executing any action and depends on the capacity to represent one event as the cause of another one. These studies demand the reexamination of the sense of agency, and of temporal binding as its diagnostic tool. I propose a causal view of the sense of agency, according to which action awareness arises when your action is represented as causing an effect. Because representing an action as causing outcomes affects time perception creating the illusion of event proximity, the causal view explains and operationalizes the sense of agency through the connection between causality and time, thus overcoming the indeterminacy of previous accounts. The causal view can pave the way to novel experimental perspectives in development and evolution and stimulate new thinking on the relationship between subjectivity, causal cognition, and time perception.

The Subjective Duration of Looming and Receding Emotional Faces

Time perception is not veridical, but, rather, it is susceptible to environmental context, like the intrinsic dynamics of moving stimuli. The direction of motion has been reported to affect time perception such that the movement of objects toward an observer is perceived as longer in duration than that of objects away from the observer. This looming-motion-induced time dilation has been explained in terms of an arousal-based or an attentional mechanism (or a combination of both). The current study was interested in which of these two explanations represents a more viable mechanism. With this aim, we investigated how the looming/receding temporal asymmetry is modulated by the emotional contents of stimuli. In two experiments, participants were shown face images expressing three emotions (angry, happy, and neutral) for one of seven target durations (400-1000ms) and performed a temporal bisection task by judging each presentation duration as “short” or “long”. In Experiment 1, the face images were shown in a constant-sized, stationary position. In Experiment 2, the images were expanding (looming) or contracting (receding) in size. In Experiment 1, we found no influence of facial emotion in perceived duration. In Experiment 2, however, looming stimuli were perceived as longer in duration than receding ones, replicating previous findings of the looming-induced time dilation using naturalistic human-face stimuli. More importantly, in Experiment 2 we found an interaction effect between arousal rating of faces and motion direction: The looming/receding asymmetry was pronounced when the arousal of the presented images was rated low, but this asymmetry diminished when arousal was high. These results suggest that (1) affective characteristics of looming stimuli can modulate temporal processing and more specifically, (2) the looming/receding asymmetry is reduced when arousing facial expressions enhance attentional engagement to receding stimuli, supporting the attentional mechanism of the looming-induced time dilation.

Change biases identify the features that drive time perception.

Time perception is malleable, and the perceived duration of stimuli can be strongly affected by the sensory response they evoke. Such "temporal illusions" provide a window on how different sensory systems contribute to our sense of time. Evidence suggests that the sensory response to different features affects time perception to different extents, mediated by the level of arousal or surprise that they evoke. This, however, makes it difficult to disentangle effects of the sensory response itself from the derived arousal or surprise effects. Here, we demonstrate that time perception is differentially affected by different stimulus features when arousal and surprise are kept constant. In four temporal discrimination experiments, participants were presented with empty intervals (1.25 s-2.25 s) marked by two briefly presented visual marker stimuli, and judged whether the duration was longer or shorter than a 1.75 s reference. Markers either repeated or changed along one of six feature dimensions, in a manner fully predictable to participants. Repetitions and changes would modulate sensory response magnitudes due to neural repetition suppression. Results showed that intervals were perceived as longer when markers changed in location, size, or numerosity. Conversely, changes in face identity, orientation or luminance did not affect time perception. These results point to neural and functional selectivity in the way different stimulus features affect time perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural Repetition Suppression Modulates Time Perception: Evidence From Electrophysiology and Pupillometry.

Human time perception is malleable and subject to many biases. For example, it has repeatedly been shown that stimuli that are physically intense or that are unexpected seem to last longer. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed to account for such biases: One states that these temporal illusions are the result of increased levels of arousal that speeds up neural clock dynamics, whereas the alternative "magnitude coding" account states that the magnitude of sensory responses causally modulates perceived durations. Common experimental paradigms used to study temporal biases cannot dissociate between these accounts, as arousal and sensory magnitude covary and modulate each other. Here, we present two temporal discrimination experiments where two flashing stimuli demarcated the start and end of a to-be-timed interval. These stimuli could be either in the same or a different location, which led to different sensory responses because of neural repetition suppression. Crucially, changes and repetitions were fully predictable, which allowed us to explore effects of sensory response magnitude without changes in arousal or surprise. Intervals with changing markers were perceived as lasting longer than those with repeating markers. We measured EEG (Experiment 1) and pupil size (Experiment 2) and found that temporal perception was related to changes in ERPs (P2) and pupil constriction, both of which have been related to responses in the sensory cortex. Conversely, correlates of surprise and arousal (P3 amplitude and pupil dilation) were unaffected by stimulus repetitions and changes. These results demonstrate, for the first time, that sensory magnitude affects time perception even under constant levels of arousal.