Time In Action: The Influence of Linguistic and Visual Action Representations on Time Perception

Abstract

The perception of motion has been consistently shown to have a significant impact on our subjective experience of time. While previous researchers have explored how the perception of motion influences our temporal experience, the potential influence of linguistic and visual representations of action on time perception has relatively been less investigated. Research has shown the activation of motor areas in the brain when processing temporal units. These areas are also activated when processing action-related semantics and images. We conducted two experiments to study the influence of action verbs and images on time, separately. By examining these two forms of stimuli, we seek to understand whether the representation of action-related information in the brain affects our temporal judgment similar to our perception of actual motion, or whether there are any differences. We also wanted to explore whether the influence of action on time perception is consistent across both the linguistic and visual domains, or if there are differences between the two. To test our hypotheses we conducted two experiments using a temporal bisection task. Our results indicated that participants underestimated the duration of the action verbs as compared to the non-action ones. This underestimation may be due to the involvement of similar neural networks in causal action and perception of action words.