Social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic brought several modifications in our daily lives. With these changes, some people have reported alterations in their feelings of how fast time was passing. In this study, we assessed whether and how social distancing and the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced participants’ time awareness and production of time intervals. Participants (
n
= 3855) filled in the first questionnaire approximately 60 days after the start of social distancing in Brazil and weekly questionnaires for 15 weeks during social distancing. Our results indicate that time was perceived as expanded at the beginning, but this feeling decreased across the weeks. Time awareness was strongly associated with psychological factors such as loneliness, stress, and positive emotions, but not with time production. This relation was shown between participants and within their longitudinal reports. Together, our findings show how emotions are a crucial aspect of how time is felt.
Human behavior is biased by past experience. For example, when intercepting a moving target, the speed of previous targets will bias responses in future trials. Neural mechanisms underlying this so-called serial dependence are still under debate. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the previous trial leaves a neural trace in brain regions associated with encoding task-relevant information in visual and/or motor regions. We reasoned that injecting noise by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over premotor and visual areas would degrade such memory traces and hence reduce serial dependence. To test this hypothesis, we applied bursts of TMS pulses to right visual motion processing region hV5/MT1 and to left dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) during intertrial intervals of a coincident timing task performed by twenty healthy human participants (15 female). Without TMS, participants presented a bias toward the speed of the previous trial when intercepting moving targets. TMS over PMd decreased serial dependence in comparison to the control Vertex stimulation, whereas TMS applied over hV5/MT1 did not. In addition, TMS seems to have specifically affected the memory trace that leads to serial dependence, as we found no evidence that participants' behavior worsened after applying TMS. These results provide causal evidence that an implicit short-term memory mechanism in premotor cortex keeps information from one trial to the next, and that this information is blended with current trial information so that it biases behavior in a visuomotor integration task with moving objects.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.