Abstract This study explored the effect of verbal cues, and of the expectations they create, on perceived speed and duration using audiovisual stimuli across two experiments. In both experiments, participants viewed identical stimuli of two different durations, featuring a female cartoon-like avatar speaking in German. Through instructions, participants were led to expect that the stimuli will be presented in various speeds, although there were no actual speed variations. In Experiment 1, participants reproduced the duration of each stimulus and rated its speed on a 1–9 scale. The results showed that the speed instructions significantly affected both speed perception and reproduced durations, with stimuli presented as “fast” being rated as faster and reproduced as shorter, while those presented as “slow” being rated as slower and reproduced as longer. Experiment 2 focused exclusively on the time reproduction task to rule out the possibility that speed information retained in memory influenced participants’ reproduced durations in Experiment 1, as they were requested to first reproduce the duration and then rate the speed. The results of Experiment 2 were similar to those of Experiment 1, suggesting that verbal cues alone even without actual changes in speed or duration — can influence perceived durations, highlighting the role of expectations in shaping time perception.
Abstract All human action is guided by when to act and is refined over time via feedback. However, in the real world, feedback is often ambiguous; how we learn to time in the face of imprecise feedback has been relatively underexplored. Here, participants were required to produce target durations with variable feedback limits; they were told their performance was ‘short’ or ‘long’ if differing by more than 5%, 10% or 20% of a target duration, and ‘good’ otherwise. This provided limits on the precision of feedback to the participants. We show that, despite differences in the feedback threshold, participants were able to accurately produce target durations on average. Furthermore, while participants were sensitive to feedback, even when given ambiguous feedback telling the participant they performed ‘good,’ they were still, in general, more accurate in their following production. This demonstrates a sensitivity to timing irrespective of feedback, important to understanding how people time intervals, and perform actions generally.
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented disruptions to our lives, with lockdowns redefining our physical spaces, our social interactions and our relationship to time. The Blursday database, an international empirical research, explored how the lockdown situation affected perception of time along with psychological factors. Previous studies using this database have mainly applied univariate analyses, assessing each time perception task independently or comparing predefined participant groups. Here, we employed a multivariate approach (i.e., unsupervised machine learning) to identify distinct temporal profiles characterized by unique patterns across multiple time perception tasks. We then examined how these profiles relate to psychological factors (e.g., mood, mindfulness), exploring the relation between time perception and psychological adaptation during the first COVID-19 lockdown in France. We identified two temporal profiles with similar demographic variables and confinement severity indices. The first profile has an underestimation of retroduration timing and perceive the future distances (week and month) as closer compared to the second profile. The first profile also has lower scores of depressions, present-fatalistic, daytime dysfunction related to sleep quality and higher score of mindfulness than the second profile. This is among the first studies to adopt an integrated multivariate approach to investigate the relationship between time perception and psychological adaptation during a global lockdown. This approach demonstrated how different aspects of time perception are interdependent, and that distinct temporal profiles are linked to specific psychological adaptations in confinement situations. In this perspective, time perception tasks might be a complementary tool for psychological adaptation evaluation.
Abstract It has been argued that judgments of the speed of the passage of time (PoTj) and judgments of duration (Dj) are based on distinct mechanisms. This claim is often inferred from the lack of significant correlation between these two types of temporal judgment. The aim of the present experiment was to further examine the relationship between PoTj and Dj within a prospective temporal judgment paradigm, by testing the potential interference effect of Dj on PoTj, and vice versa. Participants were asked to make two successive judgments for the same stimulus duration in the range of seconds and minutes. The second judgment was either Dj or PoTj, while the first judgment was congruent (i.e., the same type of temporal judgment) or incongruent (i.e., the opposite type). The results clearly showed no significant interference between the two types of judgment in the two duration ranges. In addition, in the incongruent conditions, there was no significant correlation between Dj and PoTj, when Dj was rated first. Overall, these results confirm the absence of a consistent relationship between these two types of temporal judgment. Nevertheless, the complexity of PoTj and its relationship to duration is further discussed.
Abstract Building on Hoerl and McCormack’s account of temporal cognition, this paper extends their framework by proposing a developmental model grounded in empirical findings. We argue that time emerges from integrating two systems: a feature-based classificatory system and a spatially grounded object individuation system. Learning to use spatial indexicals enables children to construct an abstract spatial reference frame, which allows propositional reference and requires constraining predications to avoid contradiction. This necessity gives rise to complete coordinate system mappings (CSMs), whose ordered succession constitutes the first representational structure of temporal sequence. In this way, temporal reasoning develops as a formal consequence of maintaining consistency between spatial and classificatory cognition. Finally, we discuss what this account implies for central ontological ideas associated with time.
