Time to imagine moving: Simulated motor activity affects time perception

Abstract

Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time perception, perception-action integration theories suggest motor processes are central to the experience of the passage of time. We investigated whether sensory information and motor activity may interactively affect the perception of the passage of time. Two prospective timing tasks involved timing a visual stimulus display conveying optical flow at increasing or decreasing velocity. While doing the timing tasks, participants were instructed to imagine themselves moving at increasing or decreasing speed, independently of the optical flow. In the direct-estimation task, the duration of the visual display was explicitly judged in seconds while in the motor-timing task, participants were asked to keep a constant pace of tapping. The direct-estimation task showed imagining accelerating movement resulted in relative overestimation of time, or time dilation, while decelerating movement elicited relative underestimation, or time compression. In the motor-timing task, imagined accelerating movement also accelerated tapping speed, replicating the time-dilation effect. The experiments show imagined movement affects time perception, suggesting a causal role of simulated motor activity. We argue that imagined movements and optical flow are integrated by temporal unfolding of sensorimotor contingencies. Consequently, as physical time is relative to spatial motion, so too is perception of time relative to imaginary motion.

Aproximaciones desde la cognición corporeizada: las manos y cómo se involucran en la solución de problemas

“…Por ejemplo, se sabe que hay una relación entre los procesos de imaginación y recuerdo, y los movimientos corporales (Tapia Aróstica & Fossa, 2021). También se conoce que la sola imaginación de movimiento tiene un efecto en la percepción del tiempo, lo cual se produce a partir de información del sistema motor y la percepción del comportamiento (Spapé et al, 2022). Asimismo, aspectos cotidianos como la apreciación del humor (Xu et al, 2022) y la evaluación de productos comestibles (Ferracci et al, 2022) están determinadas por experiencias corporales concretas.…”

Time estimation during motor activity

“…Indeed, many of them tested the effects of hand movements on judging short durations of auditory (Yon et al, 2017) and visual stimuli (Yokosaka et al, 2015;Tomassini and Morrone, 2016), finding that time distortions are linked to the motor system. So far, to our knowledge, only a few studies investigated how time estimation is affected by gross body movement like walking (Kroger-Costa et al, 2013;Sayali et al, 2018;Spapé et al, 2022). Overall, they found overestimation of temporal durations during walking and speculated that movement speeds up the internal clock (Kroger-Costa et al, 2013;Sayali et al, 2018;Spapé et al, 2022).…”

“…So far, to our knowledge, only a few studies investigated how time estimation is affected by gross body movement like walking (Kroger-Costa et al, 2013;Sayali et al, 2018;Spapé et al, 2022). Overall, they found overestimation of temporal durations during walking and speculated that movement speeds up the internal clock (Kroger-Costa et al, 2013;Sayali et al, 2018;Spapé et al, 2022).…”

Anticipation of sexually arousing visual event leads to overestimation of elapsed time

“…Motor actions, speech, and nonverbal communication are all dependent on accurate duration estimation (Mauk & Buonomano, 2004; Schirmer, 2004). Yet, the human experience of time is relative changing according to expectations, sensory feedback, motor actions, and experienced emotions (Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009; Spapé, Harjunen, & Ravaja, 2022; Toso, Fassihi, Paz, Pulecchi, & Diamond, 2021). A good example of this relativity is that people perceive emotionally arousing events as longer lasting than neutral, non-arousing events of the same duration (Droit-Volet, Mermillod, Cocenas-Silva, & Gil, 2010; Tipples, 2008; 2011).…”