The Spread of the Lengthening Time Effect of Emotions in Memory: A Test in the Setting of the Central Tendency Effect

The aim of the present study was to test how the perception of an emotional stimulus colors the temporal context of judgment and modifies the participant’s perception of the current neutral duration. Participants were given two ready-set-go tasks consisting of a distribution of short (0.5–0.9 s) or long sample intervals (0.9–1.3 s) with an overlapping 0.9-s interval. Additional intervals were introduced in the temporal distribution. These were neutral for the two temporal tasks in a control condition and emotional for the short, but not the long temporal task in an emotion condition. The results indicated a replication of a kind of Vierordt’s law in the control condition, i.e., the temporal judgment toward the mean of the distribution of sample intervals (central tendency effect). However, there was a shift in the central tendency effect in the emotion condition indicating a general bias in the form of an overestimation of current intervals linked to the presence of a few emotional stimuli among the previous intervals. This finding is entirely consistent with timing mechanisms driven by prior duration context, particularly experience of prior emotional duration.

Retrospective Temporal Judgment of the Period Dedicated to Recalling a Recent or an Old Emotional Memory

Sixty-one participants were asked (a) to recall a memory for a period lasting 15 minutes and (b), at the end of this period, to estimate retrospectively the duration of this period. They were assigned to one of four groups: the memory was either joyful or sad, and was recent (within the past two years) or old (when the participant was 7 to 10 years old). The most critical finding is the demonstration that the age of the recalled memory has an impact on the verbal estimation. More specifically, duration is underestimated in the old but not in the recent memory condition. Moreover, in this study, recalling a memory, old or recent, is shown to be an efficient way to generate a joyful or sad emotion. Finally, the results also indicate that there is a significant correlation between the uncertainty related to the duration estimated retrospectively and the score on the present-hedonistic scale of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory.

The Effect of Immediate and Lifetime Experience of Reading Horizontal and Vertical Texts on Chinese Speakers’ Temporal Orientation

The present study examined participants’ performance on a temporal judgment task while holding language constant but varying their lifetime and immediate reading experience of horizontal and vertical texts. Chinese participants from Taiwan and China were randomly assigned to a reading task involving horizontally or vertically arranged texts. A temporal judgment task (spatial-temporal association of response codes or starc) followed the reading task, asking the participants to judge if the event depicted in a second picture occurred earlier or later than that in a first picture. Responses were faster when the left keys represented the ‘earlier’ responses than when the right keys did (a starc effect). Half of the participants responded with horizontally oriented keys while the rest with vertically oriented keys. For the Taiwan participants, the overall starc effect was greater when the response keys were vertical than horizontal, but no difference was observed for the China participants. A questionnaire indicates that the two groups of participants had similar lifetime experiences of reading horizontal texts, but the Taiwan participants read vertical texts in their life far more frequently than the China participants. Immediate reading experiences interacted with lifetime experiences in modulating the vertical bias. For the Taiwan participants, the vertical bias was strong following the vertical prime, but disappeared following the horizontal prime. For the China participants, the horizontal prime led to no vertical bias whereas the vertical prime brought about a horizontal bias. We conclude that the directionality of orthography and speakers’ immediate and lifetime reading experiences can better explain the vertical bias (or the lack of it) in the Chinese speakers’ temporal thinking. The findings, however, may be interpreted as constituting a different manifestation of linguistic relativity and recast under a broader framework of the extended-mind hypothesis of human cognition.

Fast Forward: Supramarginal Gyrus Stimulation Alters Time Measurement

The neural basis of temporal processing is unclear. We addressed this important issue by performing two experiments in which repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) was administered in different sessions to the left or right supramarginal gyrus (SMG) or vertex; in both tasks, two visual stimuli were presented serially and subjects were asked to judge if the second stimulus was longer than the first (standard) stimulus. rTMS was presented on 50% of trials. Consistent with a previous literature demonstrating the effect of auditory clicks on temporal judgment, rTMS was associated with a tendency to perceive the paired visual stimulus as longer in all conditions. Crucially, rTMS to the right SMG was associated with a significantly greater subjective prolongation of the associated visual stimulus in both experiments. These findings demonstrate that the right SMG is an important element of the neural system underlying temporal processing and, as discussed, have implications for neural and cognitive models of temporal perception and attention.

Multiple Streams of Time Consciousness: A New Model of Retrospective Timing

This note suggests a new hypothesis for retrospective timing, that, when one experiences a period of time in which plural contexts progress simultaneously, a stream of time consciousness is formed for each context and a temporal judgment to the period is made for each of the streams. In the experiment, 17 subjects observed an event in which plural contexts progressed simultaneously and estimated the time a certain thing occurred during the event. Subjects' estimated times varied with the number of changes in the context which the subjects were required to judge. The hypothesis was supported.