Time perception

About: Time perception is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1918 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87020 citations.

Odors Bias Time Perception in Visual and Auditory Modalities.

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that emotional states alter our perception of time. However, attention, which is modulated by a number of factors, such as emotional events, also influences time perception. To exclude potential attentional effects associated with emotional events, various types of odors (inducing different levels of emotional arousal) were used to explore whether olfactory events modulated time perception differently in visual and auditory modalities. Participants were shown either a visual dot or heard a continuous tone for 1000 or 4000 ms while they were exposed to odors of jasmine, lavender, or garlic. Participants then reproduced the temporal durations of the preceding visual or auditory stimuli by pressing the spacebar twice. Their reproduced durations were compared to those in the control condition (without odor). The results showed that participants produced significantly longer time intervals in the lavender condition than in the jasmine or garlic conditions. The overall influence of odor on time perception was equivalent for both visual and auditory modalities. The analysis of the interaction effect showed that participants produced longer durations than the actual duration in the short interval condition, but they produced shorter durations in the long interval condition. The effect sizes were larger for the auditory modality than those for the visual modality. Moreover, by comparing performance across the initial and the final blocks of the experiment, we found odor adaptation effects were mainly manifested as longer reproductions for the short time interval later in the adaptation phase, and there was a larger effect size in the auditory modality. In summary, the present results indicate that odors imposed differential impacts on reproduced time durations, and they were constrained by different sensory modalities, valence of the emotional events, and target durations. Biases in time perception could be accounted for by a framework of attentional deployment between the inducers (odors) and emotionally neutral stimuli (visual dots and sound beeps).

The effects of age, sex, body temperature, heart rate, and time of day on the perception of time in life:

Abstract: The present article reports on the relationship between various, physiological and sociological factors on a person’s individual perception of time in life. Specifically, 200 participants (100 male...

The spatial representation of time can be flexibly oriented in the frontal or lateral planes from an early age.

Abstract: The perception of time is strongly influenced by spatial context. The longer the distance of a stimulus' trajectory, the longer its duration is perceived to be. This effect has primarily been investigated in the lateral (left-right) axis despite the fact that spatial metaphors for time most commonly invoke the frontal (front-back) axis. We therefore explored how spatial distance, depth, and direction influenced perceived duration of stimuli moving in the frontal or lateral axes. Moreover, we compared the developmental trajectories of frontal versus lateral representations of time by testing children (5, 7, or 10 years old) and adults. Results showed that perceived duration of the interval between 2 consecutive stimuli in a temporal bisection task was biased by distance in the frontal, as well as lateral, plane across all age groups. Even the mere impression of distance in depth (Ponzo illusion), was sufficient to produce these effects. These findings indicate that the spatial representation of time can be oriented flexibly in either frontal or lateral planes from the age of 5 years and even precedes the development of explicit timing mechanisms. Motion direction in the frontal plane (looming/receding) had little effect on perceived duration in adults, though children temporally underestimated looming stimuli, possibly due to attentional mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record

Rehearsal of temporal visual information.

Abstract: This study compared the short-term retention characteristics of temporal information when subjects experienced time under either subject-defined or experimenter-defined rehearsal. Subjects were presented visual durations of 1 and 4 sec. and then required to reproduce these durations following a 15-sec. retention interval. To help maintain the durations in memory, subjects were asked to use either a conscious cognitive strategy or a mental counting strategy. It was predicted that experimenter-defined rehearsal would show less forgetting, as measured by variable error, but this prediction was not supported. There also was no evidence of any response bias or context effects in the temporal reproductions. These results were compared with two previous studies that utilized similar cognitive strategies.

Functional roles of memory for feature-location binding in event perception: Investigation with spatiotemporal visual search

Abstract: In a dynamic environment full of degraded or missing perceptual information, memory might facilitate or even substitute efficiently for perception. We tested this idea with a “spatiotemporal search” task that required participants to search for a target defined by a binding of two features across a single object, across two points in time. Eight coloured bars moved horizontally until they became partially occluded behind squares. Before the tail of the bar becomes occluded, the head of the bar reemerged with a possibly different colour. Observers were precued a subset of the bars, and judged the presence of a colour changing target among the precued set. A series of three experiments revealed that memory can substitute for perception only for one object, and that the preview of colour-location binding does not facilitate perceptual processing. Cueing location and object features do not have additive effects. Binding memory may have highly limited capacity in substitution and facilitation of perception.