Search for cardiac and respiratory influence on time perception and rhythm reproduction

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Olga Pollatos
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 34181293

• Final Report Year: 2016

Final Report Abstract

Our results highlight that the cardiac cycle and information obtained from cardiac rhythm might underpin our perception of time intervals in the range of seconds as proposed in several theoretical approaches of time perception. Synchronization analyses are a proper tool to investigate such an interrelation. As we did not observe significant correlation between time reproduction accuracy and the degree of synchronization, we therefore found evidence for our hypothesis that the heart rate influences, but does not exactly determine time estimation. Indeed, assuming for example a high degree of synchronization, i.e. a pronounced phase locking, this high synchronization would only then facilitate time reproduction accuracy if the time interval to be reproduced is a whole multiple of the individual cycle length. We therefore assume that synchronization processes reflect a mechanism that might be a systematic source of “errors” in timing tasks. A focus on bodily signals while viewing emotional content modulated retrospective duration and therefore points out that retrospective time estimation task is also crucially influenced by bodily processes. Effects on respiration were less clear (and therefore not reported here), so that future research must focus stronger on this system to develop or adapt methods developed in this project. We conclude that the heart and information from the heart cycle could serve as input signals used for the reproduction of time intervals in the range of several seconds. Our results highlight one important mechanism of the embodiment of time.

Publications

• (2012). The body in the mind: On the relationship between interoception and embodiment. Topics in cognitive science, 4, 692-704
  Herbert, B. M. and Pollatos, O.
  
• (2014). How much time has passed? Ask your heart. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 8:15
  Pollatos, O., Yeldesbay, A., Pikovsky, A., and Rosenblum, M.
  
• (2014). Interoceptive focus shapes the experience of time. PlosOne, 9:e86943
  Pollatos, O., Laubrock, J., and Wittmann, M.
  
• (2016). The role of the body from the inside for embodied cognition. In Y.Coello and M. H. Fischer (Eds.), Perceptual and emotional embodiment (pp. 262-278). New York: Routledge
  Pollatos, O.