Communication through body gestures permeates our daily life. Efficient perception of the message therein reflects one’s social cognitive competency. Here we report that such competency is manifested temporally as shortened subjective duration of social interactions: motion sequences showing agents acting communicatively are perceived to be significantly shorter in duration as compared with those acting noncommunicatively. The strength of this effect is negatively correlated with one’s autistic-like tendency. Critically, intranasal oxytocin administration restores the temporal compression effect in socially less proficient individuals, whereas the administration of atosiban, a competitive antagonist of oxytocin, diminishes the effect in socially proficient individuals. These findings indicate that perceived time, rather than being a faithful representation of physical time, is highly idiosyncratic and ingrained with one’s personality trait. Moreover, they suggest that oxytocin is involved in mediating time perception of social interaction, further supporting the role of oxytocin in human social cognition.

Recent sensory history plays a critical role in duration perception. It has been established that after adapting to a particular duration, the test durations within a certain range appear to be distorted. To explore whether the aftereffect of perceived duration can be constrained by sensory modality and stimulus feature within a modality, the current study applied the technique of simultaneous sensory adaptation, by which observers were able to simultaneously adapt to two durations defined by two different stimuli. Using both simple visual and auditory stimuli, we found that the aftereffect of perceived duration is modality specific and contingent on auditory frequency but not visual orientation of the stimulus. These results demonstrate that there are independent timers responsible for the aftereffects of perceived duration in each sensory modality. Furthermore, the timer for the auditory modality may be located at a relatively earlier stage of sensory processing than the timer for the visual modality.