Cognitions about time affect perception, behavior, and physiology - A review on effects of external clock-speed manipulations

Time in suspense: investigating boredom and related states in a virtual waiting room

We studied the role of time in the experience of boredom and its relationship with various psychological states using virtual reality. Sixty-six participants visited nine virtual waiting rooms and evaluated their perception of time and psychological experiences, including boredom, exhaustion, restlessness, amotivation, frustration, anger, unhappiness, spontaneous and deliberate mind-wandering, fantasy, and absorption. Results confirmed the relationship between boredom and time perception, showing that the higher the levels of boredom, the slower time seems to pass. However, manipulating time-related information via a slower/faster ticking clock did not affect boredom. We also found that boredom increased as participants progressed through the nine virtual rooms, and its affective characterisation over time remained stable, while its cognitive characterisation fluctuated. While boredom was consistently associated with exhaustion, restlessness, amotivation, and frustration, its relationship with fantasy, absorption, spontaneous mind-wandering and deliberate mind-wandering, evolved over time. These findings provide novel insights into the intricate and differentiated cognitive and affective consequences of being bored.

Mind over muscle? Time manipulation improves physical performance by slowing down the neuromuscular fatigue accumulation

While physical performance has long been thought to be limited only by physiological factors, many experiments denote that psychological ones can also influence it. Specifically, the deception paradigm investigates the effect of psychological factors on performance by manipulating a psychological variable unbeknownst to the subjects. For example, during a physical exercise performed to failure, previous results revealed an improvement in performance (i.e., holding time) when the clock shown to the subjects was deceptively slowed down. However, the underlying neurophysiological changes supporting this performance improvement due to deceptive time manipulation remain unknown. Here, we addressed this issue by investigating from a neuromuscular perspective the effect of a deceptive clock manipulation on a single-joint isometric task conducted to failure in 24 healthy participants (11 females). Neuromuscular fatigue was assessed by pre- to post-exercise changes in quadriceps maximal voluntary torque (Tmax ), voluntary activation level (VAL), and potentiated twitch (TTW ). Our main results indicated a significant performance improvement when the clock was slowed down (Biased: 356 ± 118 s vs. Normal: 332 ± 112 s, p = .036) but, surprisingly, without any difference in the associated neuromuscular fatigue (p > .05 and BF < 0.3 for Tmax , VAL, and TTW between both sessions). Computational modeling showed that, when observed, the holding time improvement was explained by a neuromuscular fatigue accumulation based on subjective rather than actual time. These results support a psychological influence on neuromuscular processes and contribute significantly to the literature on the mind-body influence, by challenging our understanding of fatigue.

The feeling of the passage of time against the time of the external clock

When people say that time is passing faster or slower, they are referring to the clock time. What exactly is the role of this reference to clock time in the awareness of the passage of time? Three experiments were conducted to examine this question. In Experiment 1, participants performed an easy and a difficult task in a condition with or without an external clock. In Experiment 2, the external clock was introduced after several trials of the easy task performed by the same participants. In Experiment 3, the speed of the clock hands was manipulated. Eye movements towards the clock were recorded by an eye tracker. The results showed that time was judged to pass faster with the external clock, thus reducing the distortion of the sense of time. Indeed, participants noticed that time passed faster than they initially thought. However, our results also showed that this was an occasional and short-lived adjustment of subjective time to objective time, with a greater acceleration in the presence of the fast clock. Indeed, the clock quickly lost its effect after a few trials, the feeling of the passage remaining based on the emotion felt, i.e., the boredom felt in the easy task. Our experiments thus showed that the feeling of the passage of time is primarily grounded in the emotional affect experienced (Embodiment), and that knowledge of clock time had only a small and transient corrective effect.

Dissociating passage and duration of time experiences through the intensity of ongoing visual change

The experience of passage of time is assumed to be a constitutive component of our subjective phenomenal experience and our everyday life that is detached from the estimation of time durations. However, our understanding of the factors contributing to passage of time experience has been mostly restricted to associated emotional and cognitive experiences in temporally extended situations. Here, we tested the influence of low-level visual stimuli on the experience of passage and duration of time in 10–30 s intervals. We introduce a new paradigm in a starfield environment that allows to study the effects of basic visual aspects of a scene (velocity and density of stars in the starfield) and the duration of the situation, both embedded in a color tracking task. Results from two experiments show that velocity and density of stars in the starfield affect passage of time experience independent from duration estimation and the color tracking task: the experienced passage of time is accelerated with higher rates of moment-to-moment changes in the starfield while duration estimations are comparably unaffected. The results strongly suggest differential psychological processes underlying the experience of time passing by and the ability to estimate time durations. Potential mechanisms behind these results and the prospects of experimental approaches towards passage of time experience in psychological and neuroscientific research are discussed.

Effects of smooth pursuit and second-order stimuli on visual motion prediction

The purpose of this study was to determine whether smooth pursuit eye movements affect visual motion prediction using a time‐to‐contact task where observers anticipate the exact instant that a partially occluded target would coincide with a stationary object. Moreover, we attempted to clarify the influence of second‐order motion on visual motion prediction during smooth pursuit. One target object moved to another stationary object (6 deg apart) at constant velocity of 3, 4, and 5 deg/s, and then the two objects disappeared 500 ms after the onset of target motion. The observers estimated the moment the moving object would overlap the stationary object and pressed a button. For the pursuit condition, both a Gaussian window and a random dots texture moved in the same direction at the same speed for the first‐order motion, whereas a Gaussian window moved over a static background composed of random dots texture for the second‐order motion. The results showed that the constant error of the time‐to‐contact shifted to a later response for the pursuit condition compared to the fixation condition, regardless of the object velocity. In addition, during smooth pursuit, the constant error for the second‐order motion shifted to an earlier response compared to the first‐order motion when the object velocity was 3 deg/s, whereas no significant difference was found at 4 and 5 deg/s. Therefore, our results suggest that visual motion prediction using a time‐to‐contact task is affected by both eye movements and motion configuration such as second‐order motion.

Boosting working memory with accelerated clocks

Our perception of time varies with the degree of cognitive engagement in tasks. The perceived passage of time accelerates while working on demanding tasks, whereas time appears to drag during boring situations. Our experiment aimed at investigating whether this relationship is mutual: Can manipulated announcements of elapsed time systematically affect the attentional resources applied to a cognitive task? We measured behavioral performance and the EEG in a whole report working memory paradigm with six items of different colors that each had to be reported after a short delay period. The 32 participants were informed about the current time after each 20 trials, while the clock was running at either 100% (normal), 120% (fast), or 80% (slow) of normal clock speed depending on the experimental block. The mean number of correctly reported colors per trial was significantly increased in the fast as compared to the slow and normal clock conditions. In the EEG, we focused on neural oscillations during working memory encoding and storage. As an electrophysiological correlate of task engagement, frontal theta power during the storage interval was increased in the fast clock condition. Also, the power of frontal theta oscillations predicted the number of correctly reported colors on a single-trial basis. This shows that a covert manipulation of clock speed can lead to an improvement in cognitive performance, presumably mediated by a higher allocation of attentional resources resulting from an adaptation of the subjective passage of time during an experiment.

Effortful listening under the microscope: Examining relations between pupillometric and subjective markers of effort and tiredness from listening

Effort during listening is commonly measured using the task-evoked pupil response (TEPR); a pupillometric marker of physiological arousal. However, studies to date report no association between TEPR and perceived effort. One possible reason for this is the way in which self-report effort measures are typically administered, namely as a single data point collected at the end of a testing session. Another possible reason is that TEPR might relate more closely to the experience of tiredness from listening than to effort per se. To examine these possibilities, we conducted two preregistered experiments that recorded subjective ratings of effort and tiredness from listening at multiple time points and examined their covariance with TEPR over the course of listening tasks varying in levels of acoustic and attentional demand. In both experiments, we showed a within-subject association between TEPR and tiredness from listening, but no association between TEPR and effort. The data also suggest that the effect of task difficulty on the experience of tiredness from listening may go undetected using the traditional approach of collecting a single data point at the end of a listening block. Finally, this study demonstrates the utility of a novel correlation analysis technique ("rmcorr"), which can be used to overcome statistical power constraints commonly found in the literature. Teasing apart the subjective and physiological mechanisms that underpin effortful listening is a crucial step toward addressing these difficulties in older and/or hearing-impaired individuals.

Time flies faster when you're feeling blue: sad mood induction accelerates the perception of time in a temporal judgment task

Investigating the interaction of mood and time perception has provided key information in the mechanisms that underlie cognition and emotion. However, much of the literature that has investigated the role of emotions in time perception has focused on the valence of stimuli, or correlational studies of self-reported mood. In the present study, 31 healthy undergraduates completed a temporal judgment task before and after an autobiographical sad mood induction procedure. In the temporal judgment task, participants identified whether a presented neutral stimulus was onscreen for the same duration as a target (2 s). Along with target trials, very short (1.25 s), short (1.6 s), long (2.25 s), and very long (3.125 s) trials were presented in random order and in equal proportion. Following mood induction, ratings of sadness and fear increased, but returned to baseline at the end of the study. After the mood induction, participants significantly increased temporal overestimation as participants were more likely to affirm short than long-duration trials as matching the target. These results indicate that transient changes in mood in otherwise healthy adults can accelerate the subjective experience of time. Sadness may increase physiological components of time perception that are related approach motivation.

Using Virtual Reality to Study Subjective Time in Crowded Versus Uncrowded Environments

Human density in different locations influences time estimation. In this article, we report three experiments investigating whether research in virtual reality (VR) environments would replicate this earlier finding. In our first experiment, 35 participants wore head-mounted VR displays and watched two videos showing a cityscape and a countryside. While watching each video, participants were asked to provide their perceptions of 30 seconds of time passage. Perceived time in the cityscape condition was longer than in the countryside condition. In our second experiment, 43 participants wore head-mounted VR displays and watched two videos showing a crowded and uncrowded Ikebukuro station. While watching these videos, participants were asked to provide their perceptions of 60 seconds of time passage. Perceived time in the crowded condition was longer relative to the uncrowded condition. In our third experiment, 21 participants wore head-mounted displays and watched two videos showing a crowded and uncrowded nature park. While watching the videos, participants were asked to provide their perceptions of 60 seconds of time passage. These repeated findings in VR environments of longer time perception in crowded versus uncrowded conditions were similar to data reported by who examined how location and human density affected subjective time in the real world. We discussed the implications of the VR tool in subjective time research and how people perceive and use VR environments in daily life.