Differences In Time Perception Research Articles

Time Perspective in Patients with Affective Disorders: Review of Scientific Research

The article presents the results of the theoretical analysis of the Russian and international studies devoted to the phenomenon of the time perspective of the personality. The time perspective is an extremely relevant research topic, and at the same time, a littlestudied area of psychological and psychiatric science. The history of the term is briefly described, the main approaches to the definition of the concept are considered, the important properties and characteristics of the time perspective of the individual are determined. In this article, the features of the time perspective of a personality are considered with regard to anxiety and depression, important manifestations of affective disorders; the properties of the temporal perspective are considered in the context of manifestations of anxiety and depression in patients with affective disorders. The connection of the depressive episodes and the subjective attitude to the past, present, and future is marked, the role of dysfunctional time perspective in the context of depressive and anxious experiences is emphasized. The influence of subjective perception of time, especially future, on the increasing anxiety is reflected. Some foreign and domestic studies of the time perspective in patients with affective disorders are considered and analyzed. We found some differences in subjective perception of time and time perspective in patients with anxious and depressive manifestations: the speed of time in depressed patients is slowed down, in anxious patients it is accelerated; as for the attitude to the past, present, and future, in patients with severe depressive manifestations there is a pessimistic attitude to the events of the future and fixation on the events of the past.

Slowhand: Does time perception change in peri-hand space?

A variety of attentional and perceptual changes occur in peri-hand space, including increases in visual temporal acuity. These changes in cognition have been related to an increase in magnocellular visual processing. Other magnocellular-related processes have been shown to enhance temporal sensitivity and lead to time overestimation. We hypothesized that a similar slowing of time perception would occur in peri-hand space. To this end, we had participants complete either a temporal bisection task or a verbal time estimation task with their hands near to or far from the test stimuli. Contrary to our predictions, we found no differences in time perception in peri-hand space. We situate our findings within the context of a contemporaneous study by Qi, Wang, He, and Du (2019), which produced conflicting results when using a temporal reproduction task to investigate the same phenomenon. The disparate results might relate to the fragility of peri-hand effects and/or to the tasks tapping into different aspects of time perception. Further research will be needed to fully elucidate the nuances of peri-hand space and temporal processing.

ADHD and Time Perception: Findings and Treatments

This mini review aims to explore the intricate connection between ADHD and time perception along with some new findings on new treatments to manage ADHD symptoms. The topic of time perception is addressed from a variety of perspectives and with an understanding that although differences in time perception are not listed among the primary symptoms of the disorder, they are of the utmost importance to understand the condition and possibly new treatment plans. We also review some of the new findings on ADHD and time perception, and look at the usefulness of certain psychometric tools like the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory recent research into educational video games and apps for managing the disorder.

How Time Flies!

The paper identifies a potential gap between intertemporal choices and time preference: The elicited intertemporal decisions could be partly driven by a biased perception of time and thus may not completely reveal the actual time preference. To test this, we explore the causal relationship between time perception and intertemporal choices by conducting a laboratory experiment, in which cognitive load is used as a stimulating instrument to induce differences in time perception. We establish that the perceived time lengths for subjects with high cognitive load are shorter than those with low cognitive load and that individuals who underestimate time appear more patient in their intertemporal decisions. The mediation analyses show that time perception mediates a significant part of the cognitive load’s effect on intertemporal choices. Our study thus demonstrates that the time preference identified by intertemporal choices might be confounded by the potentially biased perception of how time flies.

Sex differences in time perception during self-paced running

Sex differences in time perception during self-paced running

Sex Differences in Time Perception During Smoking Abstinence

Nicotine withdrawal leads to impulsive decision-making, which reflects a preference for smaller, immediate rewards and often prompts a relapse to smoking. The mechanism by which nicotine withdrawal leads to impulsive decision-making is not well known. An essential dimension of decision-making is time perception. Impulsive decisions reflect intolerance of temporal delays and the perception that time is passing more slowly. Sex may be an important factor in impulsive decision-making and time perception, but no studies have investigated whether sex moderates the effects of nicotine withdrawal on impulsive decision-making and time perception. Thirty-three (12 female) adult smokers completed 2 laboratory sessions: following 24-hr abstinence and once smoking-as-usual (order counterbalanced, abstinence biochemically verified). Participants completed 2 time perception tasks, a decision-making task, and self-report measures of craving, withdrawal, and mood. During time reproduction, males overestimated time during abstinence compared to smoking, whereas there was no session effect for females. On the time discrimination task, smokers were less accurate during abstinence, and this effect tended to be stronger among females. In general, males had higher discounting rates compared with females, but there was no effect of abstinence. The current data suggest that the effect of abstinence on time perception may be stronger in males and that males generally exhibit steeper delay discounting rates. Time perception may be an important mechanism in smoking abstinence. Our future work will investigate the role of time perception in smoking relapse and whether this is moderated by sex.

"Free will": are we all equal? A dynamical perspective of the conscious intention to move.

In their seminal (1983) study, Libet and colleagues suggested that awareness of one’s intention to act has a postdictive character in that it occurs long after cerebral activity leading to action has been initiated. Crucially, Libet et al. further suggested that the time window (±200 ms) between the conscious experience of the intention to act and the action itself offers people the possibility of “vetoing” the unfolding action. This raises the question of whether there are individual differences in the duration of this “veto window” and which components of the readiness potential (RP) and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) explain this variability. It has been reported that some psychiatric diseases lead to shorter intervals between conscious intentions and actions. However, it is unclear whether such patients suffer from impairment of the sense of volition, thus experiencing voluntary movements as involuntary, or whether voluntary inhibition of action is actually reduced, since conscious intention occurs later. We had two aims in the present paper. First, we aimed at clarifying the role of consciousness in voluntary actions by examining the relation between the duration of the veto window and impulsivity. Second, we sought to examine different components of the RP and LRP waveforms so as to attempt to explain observed variability in W judgments. Our results indicate (1) that impulsive people exhibit a shorter delay between their intention and the action than non-impulsive people, and (2) that this difference can hardly be attributed to a difference in time perception. Electroencephalography indicated that the rate of growth of the RP is relevant to explain differences in W judgments, since we observed that the RP at the moment of conscious intention is lower for people with late conscious intention than for people with early conscious intention. The onset and the intercept of these waveforms were less interpretable. These results bring new light on the role that consciousness plays in voluntary action.

Effects of emotional stimuli on time perception in manic and euthymic patients with bipolar disorder.

Time perception, which plays a fundamental role in decision-making and the evaluation of the environment, is also influenced by emotions. Patients with bipolar disorder have impairments in emotional processing as well as interval timing. We investigated the effects of emotional stimuli on time estimation and reproduction in manic and euthymic bipolar patients compared with healthy controls. We recruited 22 manic bipolar patients, 24 euthymic bipolar patients and 24 healthy controls. Each subject performed time estimation and reproduction tasks using standardized affective pictures that were classified into 4 stimulus groups according to valence and level of arousal and presented for durations of 2, 4, and 6s. We analyzed temporal performance on these tasks using transformed data expressed as a proportion of the target period. The interactions between arousal and valence were different in manic patients compared with euthymic patients and healthy controls in both time estimation and reproduction tasks. Manic patients showed no effect of positive valence low arousal stimuli in the time estimation task compared to euthymic patients and healthy controls. In the time reproduction task, the effect of emotional stimuli was reversed in manic patients compared to euthymic patients and healthy controls. Significant correlations between the severity of manic symptoms or illness severity and average temporal performance scores were found in manic patients. Our results suggest that altered emotion-related time judgments may be a state-dependent phenomenon observed in manic patients only. This difference in time perception for emotional stimuli may be related to the underlying neurobiological mechanisms of the manic state.

Time perception and time perspective differences between adolescents and adults

The present experiment aimed to investigate the differences in time perception and time perspective between subjects representing two developmental stages, namely adolescence and middle adulthood. Twenty Chinese adolescents aged 15–25 and twenty Chinese adults aged 35–55 participated in the study. A time discrimination task and a time reproduction task were implemented to measure the accuracy of their time perception. The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (Short-Form) was adopted to assess their time orientation. It was found that adolescents performed better than adults in both the time discrimination task and the time reproduction task. Adolescents were able to differentiate different time intervals with greater accuracy and reproduce the target duration more precisely. For the time reproduction task, it was also found that adults tended to overestimate the duration of the target stimuli while adolescents were more likely to underestimate it. As regards time perspective, adults were more future-oriented than adolescents, whereas adolescents were more present-oriented than adults. No significant relationship was found between time perspective and time perception.

Supplementary motor area activations predict individual differences in temporal-change sensitivity and its illusory distortions

Perception of time and temporal change is critical for human cognition. Yet, perception of temporal change is susceptible to contextual influences such as changes of a sound's pitch. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the current study aimed to investigate perception of temporal rate change and pitch-induced illusory distortions. In a 6×6 design, human participants (N=19) listened to frequency-modulated sounds (~4Hz) that varied over time in both modulation rate and pitch. Participants judged the direction of rate change (‘speeding up’ vs. ‘slowing down’), while ignoring changes in pitch. Behaviorally, rate judgments were strongly biased by pitch changes: Participants perceived rate to slow down when pitch decreased and to speed up when pitch increased (‘rate-change illusion’). The fMRI data revealed activation increases with increasing task difficulty in pre-SMA, left putamen, and right IFG/insula. Importantly, activation in pre-SMA was linked to the perceptual sensitivity to discriminate rate changes and, together with the left putamen, to relative reductions in susceptibility to pitch-induced illusory distortions. Right IFG/insula activations, however, only scaled with task difficulty. These data offer a distinction between regions whose activations scale with perceptual sensitivity to features of time (pre-SMA) and those that more generally support behaving in difficult listening conditions (IFG/insula). Hence, the data underscore that individual differences in time perception can be related to different patterns of neurofunctional activation.

Analysis of Specific Cognitive Ability Characteristics of Chinese Women Curling Athletes

To provide cognitive psychological evidences in material selection, training and competition for athletes in Chinese women curling, methods include document literature, expert interview, experimental measurement and mathematical statics are employed. Athletes in National women curling team and provincial curling team of Heilongjiang are the main object of this study. In terms of cognitive ability, systematic research of women curling athletes’ psychological feature are conducted. Research results show that, women curling athletes at different level have very significant differences in index of attention concentration and significant differences in time perception, depth perception and movement memory; athletes of different training time have very significant differences in index of wrist stability, and female curling athletes are tend to be inferior to their male counterparts in attention focusing.

Sex Differences in Time Perception During Self-Paced Running

Sex Differences in Time Perception During Self-Paced Running

GABA Predicts Time Perception

Our perception of time constrains our experience of the world and exerts a pivotal influence over a myriad array of cognitive and motor functions. There is emerging evidence that the perceived duration of subsecond intervals is driven by sensory-specific neural activity in human and nonhuman animals, but the mechanisms underlying individual differences in time perception remain elusive. We tested the hypothesis that elevated visual cortex GABA impairs the coding of particular visual stimuli, resulting in a dampening of visual processing and concomitant positive time-order error (relative underestimation) in the perceived duration of subsecond visual intervals. Participants completed psychophysical tasks measuring visual interval discrimination and temporal reproduction and we measured in vivo resting state GABA in visual cortex using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Time-order error selectively correlated with GABA concentrations in visual cortex, with elevated GABA associated with a rightward horizontal shift in psychometric functions, reflecting a positive time-order error (relative underestimation). These results demonstrate anatomical, neurochemical, and task specificity and suggest that visual cortex GABA contributes to individual differences in time perception.

Isolating the delay component of impulsive choice in adolescent rats

Impulsive choice—the preference for small immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards—has been linked to various psychological conditions ranging from behavioral disorders to addiction. These links highlight the critical need to dissect the various components of this multifaceted behavioral trait. Delay discounting tasks allow researchers to study an important factor of this behavior: how the subjective value of a rewards changes over a delay period. However, existing methods of delay discounting include a confound of different reward sizes within the procedure. Here we present a new approach of using a single constant reward size to assess delay discounting. A complementary approach could hold delay constant and assess the utility of changing quantities of a reward. Isolating these behavioral components can advance our ability to explore the behavioral complexity of impulsive choice. We present in detail the methods for isolating delay, and further capitalize on this method by pairing it with a standard peak interval task to test whether individual variation in delay discounting can be explained by differences in perception of time in male and female adolescent rats. We find that rats that were more precise in discriminating time intervals were also less impulsive in their choice. Our data suggest that differences in timing and delay discounting are not causally related, but instead are more likely influenced by a common factor. Further, the mean-level change in our measure between post-natal day 28 and 42 suggests this test may be capturing a developmental change in this factor. In summary, this new method of isolating individual components of impulsive choice (delay or quantity) can be efficiently applied in either adolescent or adult animal models and may help elucidate the mechanisms underlying impulsivity and its links to psychological disorders.

Subjective Duration as a Signature of Coding Efficiency: Emerging Links Among Stimulus Repetition, Predictive Coding, and Cortical GABA Levels

Immediate repetition of a stimulus reduces its apparent duration relative to a novel item. Recent work indicates that this may reflect suppressed cortical responses to repeated stimuli, arising from neural adaptation and/or the predictive coding of expected stimuli. This article summarizes recent behavioral and neurobiological studies linking perceived time to the magnitude of cortical responses, including work suggesting that variations in GABA-mediated cortical inhibition may underlie some of the individual differences in time perception. We suggest that the firing of cortical neurons can be modified using simple recurrent networks with time-dependent processes that are modulated by GABA levels. These local networks feed into a core-timing network used to integrate across stimulus inputs/modalities, thereby allowing for the coordination of multiple duration ranges and effector systems.

Time flies when you maximize — Maximizers and satisficers perceive time differently when making decisions

Three experiments assessed whether maximizing and satisficing decision-making types were associated with differences in perception of time, as a consequence of their different cognitive workloads. Findings showed that maximizers and satisficers perceived time differently during decision-making, but not during other tasks. In particular, compared to satisficers, maximizers tended to underestimate time while choosing, independently of the number of options and the specific task requirements. Satisficers instead tended to underestimate time only when the number of options or the task requirements were more challenging. Our findings suggest that the perception of time may serve as a measure of the cognitive workload associated with decision-making types. The findings furthermore suggest that satisficers adopt a more malleable decision-making process than maximizers.

Degree of handedness, emotion, and the perceived duration of auditory stimuli

Humans exhibit a remarkable ability to accurately judge time intervals, but this ability varies among individuals and across situations. Research suggests that arousal and attentional factors are consistently associated with subjective time distortions, and emotions such as anger, which can elicit arousal and attract attention, have frequently been studied in this context. Typically, viewing angry faces seems to consistently produce time overestimation relative to neutral faces, and the present study investigates the possibility that this effect extends to angry voices by means of a temporal bisection task. Additionally, this paper furthers previous findings that interhemispheric interaction as quantified by handedness strength (i.e., the degree to which one favours one hand over the other) is related to how individuals perceive future time points on an imagined time task, and explores the possibility that handedness strength differences may also manifest as differences in bisection task performance. Results showed that handedness strength was associated with differences in time perception in both objective (bisection) and subjective (imagined) contexts. Bisection task data further revealed that the angry stimulus was associated with decreased temporal sensitivity and a greater propensity to categorise stimuli as “short” as compared to the same stimulus spoken in a neutral voice, which contrasts with studies conducted using angry faces. Possible attentional explanations for these findings and suggestions for future research directions are discussed.

Cross-cultural differences in perception of time: Implications for multinational teams

Members of multinational teams likely have different perspectives on a variety of factors stemming from their different cultural backgrounds. The use and perception of time is one of the specific cultural values that differ cross-culturally and may have implications for the group dynamics and team effectiveness in multinational teams. Concepts such as time orientation, punctuality and pace of life are influenced by time-related differences among cultures. In the present article, it is argued that temporal diversity in multinational teams may serve as an input within the Input-Mediator-Output-Input model of team effectiveness (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005) and influence the team processes and outputs. Implications of cross-cultural differences in perception of time on multinational team functioning are discussed within the framework of the Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro (2001) taxonomy of team processes, which consists of 3 higher order team processes (i.e., transition processes, action processes, and interpersonal processes) that encompass 10 distinct, more specific processes. Propositions regarding the impact of temporal diversity on many of the distinct team processes and outcomes are put forward to help provide a temporal lens to future research on multinational teams.

Auditory and visual differences in time perception? An investigation from a developmental perspective with neuropsychological tests

Adults and children (5- and 8-year-olds) performed a temporal bisection task with either auditory or visual signals and either a short (0.5–1.0s) or long (4.0–8.0s) duration range. Their working memory and attentional capacities were assessed by a series of neuropsychological tests administered in both the auditory and visual modalities. Results showed an age-related improvement in the ability to discriminate time regardless of the sensory modality and duration. However, this improvement was seen to occur more quickly for auditory signals than for visual signals and for short durations rather than for long durations. The younger children exhibited the poorest ability to discriminate time for long durations presented in the visual modality. Statistical analyses of the neuropsychological scores revealed that an increase in working memory and attentional capacities in the visuospatial modality was the best predictor of age-related changes in temporal bisection performance for both visual and auditory stimuli. In addition, the poorer time sensitivity for visual stimuli than for auditory stimuli, especially in the younger children, was explained by the fact that the temporal processing of visual stimuli requires more executive attention than that of auditory stimuli.

On-track test of tilt control strategies for less motion sickness on tilting trains

Carbody tilting is today a mature and inexpensive technology that permits higher train speeds in horizontal curves, thus shortening travel time. However, tilting trains run a greater risk of causing motion sickness than non-tilting ones. It is likely that the difference in motions between the two train types contributes to the observed difference in risk of motion sickness. Decreasing the risk of motion sickness has until now been equal to increasing the discomfort related to quasi-static lateral acceleration. But, there is a difference in time perception between discomfort caused by quasi-static quantities and motion sickness, which opens up for new solutions. One proposed strategy is to let the local track conditions influence the tilt and give each curve its own optimised tilt angle. This is made possible by new tilt algorithms, storing track data and using a positioning system to select the appropriate data. The present paper reports from on-track tests involving more than 100 test subjects onboard a tilting train. A technical approach is taken evaluating the effectiveness of the new tilt algorithms and the different requirements on quasi-static lateral acceleration and lateral jerk in relative terms. The evaluation verifies that the rms values important for motion sickness can be influenced without changing the requirements on quasi-static lateral acceleration and lateral jerk. The evaluation shows that reduced quantities of motions assumed to have a relation to motion sickness also lead to a reduction in experienced motion sickness. However, a limitation of applicability is found as the lowest risk of motion sickness was not recorded for the test case with motions closest to those of a non-tilting train. An optimal level of tilt, different from no tilt at all, is obtained. This non-linear relation has been observed by other researchers in laboratory tests.