Time Changes with the Embodiment of Another’s Body Posture

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the perception of presentation durations of pictures of different body postures was distorted as function of the embodied movement that originally produced these postures. Participants were presented with two pictures, one with a low-arousal body posture judged to require no movement and the other with a high-arousal body posture judged to require considerable movement. In a temporal bisection task with two ranges of standard durations (0.4/1.6 s and 2/8 s), the participants had to judge whether the presentation duration of each of the pictures was more similar to the short or to the long standard duration. The results showed that the duration was judged longer for the posture requiring more movement than for the posture requiring less movement. However the magnitude of this overestimation was relatively greater for the range of short durations than for that of longer durations. Further analyses suggest that this lengthening effect was mediated by an arousal effect of limited duration on the speed of the internal clock system.

Time, Emotion and the Embodiment of Timing

“…Figure 4 shows the time bisection results for these three postures. There was a clear leftward shift of the Nather et al (2011) and suggest that picture duration judgments were influenced by the reactivation in memory of action dynamics associated with the content of each picture. This finding is consistent with the results of studies showing that the perception of a movement produces time dilations.…”

“…A verb referring to an arm or leg movement therefore produces an arm or leg simulation in the corresponding area of the motor system. However, Nather et al (2011) possible that the clock-speed effect triggered by the simulation of movement is only fleeting, and rapidly disappears over the course of long duration processing (van Heijnsbergen, Meeren, Grèzes & de Gelder, 2007). For this reason, we decided to replicate these time bisection results with other postures, and for two short duration ranges: one with short and long anchor durations of 100 and 400 ms (comparison durations: 100, 150, 200, 250 300, 350, 400 ms), the other with short and long anchor durations of 200 and 800 ms (comparison durations: 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800 ms).…”

Physical and mental effort disrupts the implicit sense of agency

“…However, the impact of effort on perceived duration need not be experiential, as stimuli that allude to motion, action, or exertion also elongate perceived durations. For example, faster moving non-biological stimuli are perceived to last longer than slower moving stimuli (Brown, 1995;Kaneko & Murakami, 2009), and the perceived duration of images of ballet dancer statues are lengthened when the poses reflected greater levels of exertion (Nather, Bueno, Bigand & Droit-Volet, 2011). The elongation of subjective time as a result of effort are also found for mental activity.…”

Watching a real moving object expands tactile duration: The role of task-irrelevant action context for subjective time

“…For example, a voluntary keypress can expand the perceived duration of a stimulus triggered by it (Park, SchlagRey, & Schlag, 2003), and an event is perceived as longer when it relates to an action goal and occurs during the preparation of the action (Hagura, Kanai, Orgs, & Haggard, 2012). Recent studies have shown that even the action meanings of static pictures can engender distortions of their perceived durations (Gable & Poole, 2012;Nather, Bueno, Bigand, & Droit-Volet, 2011;Orgs, Bestmann, Schuur, & Haggard, 2011;Yamamoto & Miura, 2012).…”

“…The arousal account draws on well-developed Binternal clock^models (Gibbon & Church, 1990;Gibbon, Church, & Meck, 1984;Shi, Ganzenmüller, & Müller, 2013;, which generally assume three essential stages of time processing: a clock stage, at which a pacemaker generates pulses that are transmitted to an accumulator through an on/off switch; a memory stage, during which the accumulated pulses are transferred to working memory as a measure of the target interval; and a decision stage, at which the time representation from working memory is compared to a representation from reference memory. An action or action context may arouse the internal clock system, speeding up the pacemaker and shortening the latency of the switch, resulting in an expansion of the subjective duration (Hodinott-Hill et al, 2002;Nather et al, 2011). Note, however, that not all actions or action contexts are sufficiently arousing to cause a reliable distortion of subjective duration (Yarrow et al, 2004).…”